Prot Uae pirates. Sietosita a Hts be tat Sisk a tne < tienes ate Sie . ipa tat 3 SEEM urge state tge sertitel ays tte seetaeet Scie sa ere ES rengeetgey et rtesgegbee, aus $04 28 UE}Ge ate Oaberetacgee trap taeto! “et Peretatee wary telewiae Coe tery Erte metaryesty pris siete gratgepesty ky Tiaagsee es yes Leta vary pte clade erate eee Brigit, ee ite cate bad Mt be bd TOE Daas ie Genie woere tim en ras oie ave Ha tgcaty rots eee ate Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/princetonseminar2632prin THE ‘PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN VOLUME XXVI NUMBER 3 NEW SERIES 2005 tre i CONVOCATION For Helen Katherine Jones IAIN TORRANCE Unintentional Sins JACQUELINE E. LAPSLEY LECTURES The Task of New Testament Christology LEANDER E. KECK Celtic Spirituality and the Divine Feminine MARJORIE J. THOMPSON SERMONS Girl Talk KRISTIN SALDINE Where Do You Want to Eat? C. CLIFTON BLACK Fed by Ravens JON M. WALTON PRINCETONIANA Remembering Otto Piper C. CLIFTON BLACK Memorial Minute: DeWitte Campbell Wyckoff FREDA A. GARDNER The Use and Abuse of Books ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER Book REVIEWS PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Mary Lee Fitzgerald, Chair Robert M. Adams Fred R. Anderson M. Craig Barnes Robert W. Bohl Leslie W. Braksick Amy Woods Brinkley Deena L. Candler Martha Z. Carter Warren D. Chinn Gary O. Dennis John H. Donelik Michael G. Fisch John T. Galloway, Jr. Francisco O. Garcia-Treto Joan I. Gotwals Nancy O. Gray Heather Sturt Haaga Clarence B. Ammons Stewart B. Clifford Peter E. B. Erdman Rosemary Hall Evans Sarah Belk Gambrell David H. Hughes Johannes R. Krahmer Young Pai Tain R. Torrance, President BOARD OF TRUSTEES TRUSTEES EMERITI/AE George B. Wirth, Vice Chair Karen Turner McClellan, Secretary C. Thomas Hilton F. Martin Johnson Justin M. Johnson Thomas R. Johnson Todd B. Jones Carlos D. Ledee James H. Logan, Jr. David M. Mace Deborah A. McKinley Kathy J. Nelson Earl F. Palmer William P. Robinson Thomas J. Rosser Virginia J. Thornburgh Paul E. Vawter, Jr. Victor M. Wilson Jane C. Wright William H. Scheide Arthur F. Sueltz John M. Templeton William P. Thompson Samuel G. Warr David B. Watermulder Ralph M. Wyman “EE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Stephen D. Crocco, EDITOR VOLUME XXVI NUMBER 3 NEW SERIES 2005 Mary M. Astarita, EDITORIAL ASSOCIATE CONTENTS CONVOCATION For Helen Katherine Jones Iain Torrance Unintentional Sins Jacqueline E. Lapsley LECTURES The Task of New Testament Christology Leander E. Keck Celtic Spirituality and the Divine Feminine Marjorie 7. Thompson SERMONS Girl Talk Kristin Saldine Where Do You Want to Eat? C. Clifton Black Fed by Ravens Fon M. Walton PRINCETONIANA Remembering Otto Piper C. Clifton Black Memorial Minute: DeWitte Campbell Wyckoff Freda A. Gardner The Use and Abuse of Books Archibald Alexander i THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN BOOK REVIEWS Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 1, Prolegomena, by Herman Bavinck, edited by John Bolt Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 2, God and Creation, by Herman Bavinck, edited by John Bolt Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church, by Rowan Williams The Art of Reading Scripture, edited by Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture, by Clarence Hardy III Clifford Blake Anderson Clifford Blake Anderson R. Sloane Franklin Ulrich W. Mauser Jonathan L. Walton 341 341 S45 347 349 Editor’s Note his issue of the Bu//etin contains the usual rich assortment of lectures and sermons delivered on the campus. It also contains a previously unpublished lecture by Archibald Alexander, a biographical sketch of Otto Piper, and a memorial for D. Campbell Wyckoff. These scholars were deeply committed to the Seminary and left a lasting impression on generations of students. Even today, one does not need to go too far beneath the surface of life on the campus to see evidence of their contributions. STEPHEN D. CROCCO EDITOR For Helen President Iain Torrance, of Princeton : Theological Seminary, delivered this con- Katherine Jones vocation address in Miller Chapel on Sep- tember 13, 2005 by IAIN TORRANCE Hs KATHERINE JONES died in the bombing in London on July 7, 2005. She was one of those on the London Underground, often called “the Tube,” which provided shelter from German bombs in the Second World War but is now seen as an enormous security risk. At the age of twelve, she had been a schoolchild in Lockerbie when a terrorist bomb rained debris on the village. It is ironic that, having survived that, she should die as a result of another terrorist act. David Fergusson and I attended her funeral at the Laigh Kirk in Paisley, Scotland, on July 25. The Laigh Kirk had been John Witherspoon’s church before he came to Princeton in 1768, and the transatlantic connections made me think of terrorism in the two countries. Helen was a most unusual person. She had been one of David’s and my students at the University of Aberdeen, to which she came at the age of sixteen. At the grand old age of twenty, in 1997, she graduated with first-class honors. She was the baby of her year but possessed an optimism and charm that opened doors wherever she went. She had an exhaustive and amusing knowledge of the book of Proverbs. She combined faith and service. After graduating, thinking herself far too young for ministry, she spent a year as a volunteer with the Glasgow City Mission, a soup kitchen for the homeless. She then joined PricewaterhouseCooper and qualified as an accountant. She was twenty-eight when she died, on her first postqualification job. Her infectious life-affirming faith is where I begin. That and her youth are first points of contact with this community. What follows is a reflection couched in a spirit of which I think she would have approved. Anyone who takes note of international news knows what happened after July 7, 2005. In the state of heightened alertness after a subsequent bomb attempt, a twenty-seven-year-old Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot seven times in the head after boarding the underground railway. Sir Jan Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, announced that the killing—which shocked everyone—had been directly linked to the London bomb attacks. Mr. de Menezes, it was reported, had run from police officers, had vaulted a barrier, and had been wearing a heavy winter coat. Gradually, it emerged that he had been misidentified, had not run or vaulted a barrier. He had been wearing a denim jacket. He was not believed by the surveillance team to have been about to detonate a bomb. FOR HELEN KATHERINE FONES 253 Many of us have since asked what was going on. In whose name was he shot? Whose interest did this serve? It is very hard to find a clear answer. The official response is that the killing was prompted by the need for security. It was the lesser of two evils. It was a tragic but defensible mistake. In com- pensation the bereaved family in Brazil was initially offered £15,000." All the official arguments that the shooting was defensible have to be separated from the tangle of misinformation that has so absorbed the press. Let’s examine the argument for opting for the lesser of two evils, as it is central to this reflection. The argument was recently and elegantly set out by Michael Ignatieff, in the Gifford lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 2003.’ Ignatieff sketches classical democracy, of the kind expounded by Abraham Lincoln: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”? He notes, as is obvious, that such a simple account could tend in the direction of the tyranny of the majority. How is one to understand the status of a minority? Ignatieff amplifies his account by explaining what he calls “the moral view of democracy,” according to which democracies also enshrine fundamental rights that they bestow unto the individual.* In normal times two such perspectives may coexist. In a time of tension they fly apart. The pragmatic democrat will justify all sorts of measures so as to protect the majority. The moral democrat will insist that fundamental rights may not be infringed. The theme of Michael Ignatieff’s lectures was to elaborate a third alternative, which is to follow the lesser of two evils. He is careful to preserve a strong notion that such actions may be morally wrong. The need for security and the concept of individual rights do not cancel each other out. He calls for a “balancing act,”> which must be monitored by a series of checks, for example, independence of the courts from the government, procedures for whistleblowing,® open adversarial review,’ and division of powers. Ignatieff sets out a nuanced position. He is far too sophisticated to be unaware of borderline cases in history. For example, he shows how Lincoln suspended elements of the constitution, such as habeas corpus, in order to * About US$27,000. * Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3 Thid., 3. 4 Thid., 5. 5 Tbid., 9. Thid., 22. 7 Tbid., 24. 254 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN preserve it as a whole.® He insists that acts like the killing of a suspect remain evil and may not be finessed into something considered good, but I am left deeply uneasy. What does collusion in this say to our vision? No matter what arguments are produced from security, the death of Mr. de Menezes still mattered. So what is the continuing strength of that mattering that is carried by the minority? How can we evaluate it and describe it? It seems to me that it is very important for Christianity never to lapse into an acquiescence of a kind that stills the conscience. The prophetic element in the Christian tradition supports me in this, even if somewhat raggedly. Let’s take one ancient and one modern example. The ancient one is Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes. David Bentley Hart claims that “no other ancient text known to us—Christian, Jewish, or pagan—contains so fierce, unequivocal, and indignant a condemnation of slavery.” In a world that was largely insensitive to the suffering of the poor, as opposed to the rich who were down on their luck, Gregory was against the stream."° His voice prevailed, thank God, and needs to continue speaking against other slaveries today. The modern example can be drawn from Princeton Theological Seminary. On October 21, 1953, John Mackay, third president of this seminary and moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, published his “Letter to Presbyterians.” This was a gentle but very courageous voice from the church in the midst of Senator McCarthy’s investigations. John Mackay wrote: “Under the plea that the structure of American society is in imminent peril of being shattered by a satanic conspiracy ...a subtle but potent assault upon basic human rights is now in progress. ... Treason and dissent are being confused. The shrine of conscience and private judgment, which God alone has a right to enter, is being invaded.”** 8 Thid., 6; and cf. http://www.jmu.edu/madison/center/main_pages/news/2003essay.pdf (no longer accessible). (I am grateful to Gordon Mikoski for this reference.) ° Cf. D. Bentley Hart: “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of his Eschatology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2001): 51-69. The reference in Nyssa is: In Ecclesiasten Homiliae, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, Werner Jaeger et al., eds., vol. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 1958), 334-52. ‘© On this interesting point, that the ancient world pitied the unfortunate rich but not the desperately poor, see Peter Robert Lamont Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (The Curti Lectures, 1988) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), chap. 3, “Poverty and Power.” 't “A Letter to Presbyterians Concerning the Present Situation in Our Country and in the World,” unanimously adopted by the General Council of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA on October 21, 1953; issued through the Office of the General Assembly, 510 Witherspoon Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The document is available in the Princeton Theological Seminary Library. FOR HELEN KATHERINE JONES 255 The classic position in twentieth-century decisionist moral philosophy is that of Richard Hare in Freedom and Reason."* | act morally if I can univer- salize an intention and, if it is disadvantageous to me, I am willing to apply it to myself. In that circumstance, Hare argues that where we disagree, we have no rational means of resolving dispute. We can only go to war."? What I am trying—too briefly and too raggedly—to explore is how we can be passionate in our beliefs and yet not go to war. This is why we heard the reading from the book of Samuel about King Agag. Terrible acts may have a context on the field of battle, but Agag was a prisoner of war. Since early childhood, I have struggled with this story. The text is so corrupted that I imagine others also have struggled. Gregory of Nyssa and John Mackay have become my guides and, following their example, I want to encourage different explorations and the attainment of different skills. Today we are faced by many unprecedented issues. Some are social; some are the product of new technologies. They fall outside the explicit guidelines of the ancient texts and summon us to wisdom and to new analogies. What is called for is not a new set of literal commandments but an imaginative exploration of the tradition guided by faith and worship. Such explorations occur in unexpected places. Thank goodness! I recommend to you Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Never Let Me Go."+ The book, in a way, is about the gradual recognition of a landscape as it emerges out of mist. The mist is composed of the shreds of childhood memories and self-identity formed out of episodes not properly understood. All of us have memories like that, of things said inappropriately when we were seven or eight years old, and even if we were not rebuked, some other sense alerted us that a boundary had been crossed, and the memory was stored away. The narrative voice in Ishiguro’s novel is that of Kathy H, who is thirty-one years old. She describes a childhood at a secluded English boarding school some- time in the 1990s. Her memories are of landscape, games, and conversations but are shot through with a sense of strangeness and unease. None of the children have surnames. Their health is monitored. There are the normal codes of communal living but an undisclosed fear behind it all. The children, like all children, produce artwork, but some of their paintings are removed. Gradually it dawns on the reader that Kathy and the other children are clones and that she has been “enculturated” into an acceptance of her fate. The children will become “carers,” then “donors,” and if they survive their fourth ** R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). ™3 See Hare, Freedom and Reason, 160. “4 Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2005). 256 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN donation, they will “complete.” Near the end of the novel, two of the former children manage to confront one of their former “guardians,” challenging her to raise the veil of untruth. She tells them it is too late. “However uncom- fortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease .. . [T]hey tried to con- vince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.”*> I began by referring to the killing by the police of an innocent man. Ishiguro’s novel addresses the same issue. It is the story of a thirst for security that has been allowed to grow until it is gigantic and other people do not matter. The moral theologian Helen Oppenheimer once suggested that “(t]he principle that people matter is . . . a great improvement upon ‘respect for persons.””'°® This is because it is so much less abstract and therefore so much less likely to obscure the particular. But we still need a rationale. Why do people matter? So she suggests that “the mattering of people has everything to do with their capacity to mind and to be minded about. A fetus is a potential person; a dog is an honorary person; . . . a teddy bear is a pretend person. A slug is not a person, unless maybe adopted by a child like a teddy bear; and a pebble is not a person at all.”’7 She continues: “The drunken tramp and Michelangelo both matter, and if they are both in a burning building we are in great trouble; but not in greater trouble than if we had two drunken tramps, or both Michelangelo and Raphael. ... This is where a lot more needs to be said about tragic choices, and how it is dehumanizing, and therefore not Christian, to make no room for remorse in such cases.”"® This casts further light on the death of Mr. de Menezes. The attempt by the police authority to settle with his family for a paltry sum only underlined the sense that he did not matter. A review of Ishiguro’s novel by Martha Montello really cannot be bettered. She wrote: “The coded language that Kathy has learned to describe her fate flattens the unthinkable and renders it almost ordinary.”"? It is the flattening of what is repulsive so as to sanitize it that caught my attention. In our world, where there is a multiplicity of interlocking descriptions, certain forms are allowed to assume definitive shape, much as episodes in history are far too ‘5 Tbid., 263 (my italics). ‘© Helen Oppenheimer, Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (1995): 60-76. (This quotation is from page 63.) 7 Thid., 63. 1 Ibid: 73. ‘9 Martha Montello, “Novel Perspectives on Bioethics,” in The Chronicle Review (May 13, 2005), B7. FOR HELEN KATHERINE JONES 257 often encapsulated in a single repeated photograph of such dramatic power that it silences everything else and leaves us with a perilously shallow under- standing of what took place behind it. Although his science may already be outdated, Ishiguro’s novel points to our tendency to iron out our qualms so that we collectively acquiesce or collude in something of which we should be ashamed. There is an effort of imagination required, but I have spoken about that in other addresses. Very briefly, I’d like to consider some matters of approach. It is not the case that every issue may be resolved simply by further accu- mulation of data or argument of the same type. This is because not everything occurs at the same level. In a recent article Jeffrey Stout*° draws attention to what Kent Greenawalt called “borderlines of status.”*' Certain issues straddle a fault line, and Stout suggests that “a religiously diverse society that is not prepared to explore those differences conversationally is likely to remain at a permanent impasse.” The borderline case may very well involve scripture, but there is more to it than that, and reliance on scripture alone may be a distraction. Under the surface, identities are threatened and normalities are challenged. My favorite example comes from 1871, during the intense debate over whether it was permissible for a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. In that year a group of twenty-four leading Scottish ministers (who were opposed to change) addressed a pamphlet to English Nonconformists (who generally favored change in the law).** The Scottish ministers believed that change would jeopardize existing relationships in which the sister of the wife had lived as if she were the sister of the husband as well. As a punch line, they quoted an English judge,*? who later became Lord Chancellor, saying that change would lead “to hopeless sinking into the abyss of cold and cynical indifference to the purity of our national life. ... I would rather hear of the landing of 300,000 Frenchmen at Dover than of the passing of this Bill.”*4 The Deceased Wife’s Sister Act remained under debate in the British parliament from 1835 to 1907, when enabling legislation was passed. That *© Jeffrey Stout, “Survivors of the Nations: A Response to Fergusson and Pecknold,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 59 (forthcoming). ** Kent Greenawalt, Religious Convictions and Political Choice (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1988), chaps. 6-8. *? The reference is: Charles J. Brown, “The relationships which bar marriage, consid- ered scripturally, socially and historically: being a respectful address to the Non-Conform- ist Ministers of England by Ministers of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland,” Edin- burgh 1871. I owe this reference to Dr. Richard Goldring, whose PhD I supervised in Birmingham. I sincerely hope he will publish his examination of this remarkable pamphlet. *3 Sir William Page-Wood. *4 Dr. Richard Goldring gave me this quotation. 258 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN was seventy-two years. So protracted was the debate that by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a matter of satire, even finding its way into Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Jolanthe, where the Queen of the Fairies sings: “And he shall prick that annual blister, / Marriage with deceased wife’s sister.” The very thought of such a marriage created a steamy literary genre of its own, with novels like Felicia Skene’s The Inheritance of Evil (1849) and Mary Braddon’s The Fatal Three (1888).*> There was even a martyrology. Holman Hunt, the great Pre-Raphaelite artist, whose painting The Light of the World is considered the most powerful religious image of the nineteenth century, alienated the Church of England by marrying his deceased wife’s youngest sister in November 1875 at Neuchatel.”° It is amusing for us now but was very serious then. My point is that because such subterranean issues were at stake, it bad to take a long time. It was healthy that the debate could be satirized. The creation of a literary genre aided public understanding. Much admired figures who crossed the fracture line early showed that there was not an abyss on the other side.*” A passionate debate was enabled, but there was little serious bloodshed, because it was conducted conversationally. It was not the object of a shoot-to-kill policy. Let’s make this contemporary. Even as I was writing this, I was given a copy of the report of the Presbyterian Church’s Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. I have read it eagerly and with attention. It seems to me that the theology it expresses is not so far from what I have tried to say since I came here. It points to the wounds inflicted by polarizing decisions and the limitations enforced by decisions made through up-or-down votes. It expounds a doctrine of the church and asks that we learn from church history. This is an early stage in its reception, but, metaphori- cally, I don’t believe that this report is vaulting a barrier or that it is bundled up in a winter coat to conceal a bomb. Metaphorically, it’s wearing a denim jacket. I hope that in a church, if anywhere, we can learn not to be so afraid that we insist on a shoot-to-kill policy. I cannot believe that that kind of fear is what God wishes for us. *> See Sarah Brown at http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true& UID= 1430, and The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. lan Bradley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). *© See “William Holman Hunt,” in the New Dictionary of National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). *7 71 am grateful for my colleague Jeremy Hutton’s work on the river Jordan as a boundary. See Jeremy M. Hutton: The Transjordanian Palimpsest (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2005); “The left bank of the Jordan and the rites of passage: an anthropological interpretation of 2 Samuel XIX,” Vetus Testamentum (forthcoming). FOR HELEN KATHERINE fFONES 259 We live at a time when the pace of change is accelerating, and many must feel that they are on the receiving end of the curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Yet this is where God has placed us, and our challenge is to be disciples of Jesus Christ. That is why we are all here. I am indebted to Sloane Franklin, one of our PhD students, who, three or four weeks ago, told me that I should read Rowan Williams’s new book, Why Study the Past: The Quest for the Historical Church.?® It is a wonderful book, and I recommend it to everyone. Williams’s theme is how we understand ourselves as Christians in the midst of the kind of change I have tried to describe. Ultimately, his answer is Trinitarian. The God we worship “can only fully show what it is for [God] to be God by living through the abandonment of the cross.”*? That same self-revealing God calls God’s people onto a parallel journey of self- discovery and self-disclosure. For Williams, the New Testament is not a simple record of what happened. It is the effort, he writes, to show “that the immense novelties of that community’s life, as it gradually moved away from insistence on circumcision and food law, represented a final and unsurpass- able stage in the one story that began with Abraham and Moses.”3° The process of finding meaning, hope, and God’s promise today goes hand in hand with a constant questioning of how God has led God’s people through the boundary crossings of the past. Therein we are reassured of the faithful- ness of God. This is why we heard the Sermon on the Mount. The God who speaks through Jesus and called us to make peace with our neighbor even before we offer our gift at the altar is the same God who stands now along with the homeless in New Orleans. As it said in a letter on the Web site of The Presbyterian Layman: “Labels, ideologies mean nothing after the hurri- cme; 3 >8 Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2005). *9 Tbid., 9. : 3° ibid:;-8: 3* Posted on www.layman.org on September 2, 2005 (no longer accessible). Unintentional Sins Jacqueline E. Lapsley is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological by JACQUELINE E. LAPSLEY Seminary. She preached this sermon in ia the opening communion service in Miller Leviticus 4:27-30 Chapel on September 14, 2005. OD OUR HELPER, by your Holy Spirit, open our minds, that as the Scriptures are read and your Word is proclaimed, we may be led into your truth and taught your will, for the sake of Jesus Christ our LORD. Amen. UNINTENTIONAL SINS This summer my five-year-old son checked out the same book from the public library three or four times—I’ve lost count now. It’s an oversized volume, called Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections: The Ultimate Guide to Star Wars Vehicles and Spacecraft. The book is filled with meticulously drafted drawings of every air and land craft appearing in the original Star Wars trilogy. The author, who has a doctorate in archaeology, has penned numer- ous scientific archeological publications in addition to Incredible Cross-Sections. So detailed and annotated are these near-blueprint-quality cross-sections of TIE fighters and Imperial Star Destroyers that it seems that someone with the required esoteric knowledge and skill could actually build them from these drawings. It is written in the jacket bio that the author thinks about Star Wars the same way he thinks about ancient Rome or Egypt: as “a culture from another time and place to explore.”’ He is serious about Star Wars! But here’s the thing: I’ve read this book about every other day for three months now, and I’ve seen the movies, and still, about half the time, I can’t understand what it is saying at all. Here’s an example, a description of Princess Leia’s ship, Tantive IV: “Sporting twin turbolaser turrets and a massive drive block of eleven ion turbine engines for speed, the Corellian Corvette balances defensive capabilities with a high power-to-mass ratio. . . .” Or this, concerning the Superlaser Tributary Beam Shaft on the Death Star: “Eight tributary beams unite to form the superlaser primary beam. These tributary beams are arranged around the invisible central focusing field, firing in alternate sequence. ...” I have no idea what any of this means. While I’m reading this out loud to Sam, I occasionally glance over at him to see if we are experiencing this in the same way. But his gaze is fixed on the " David West Reynolds, Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections: The Ultimate Guide to Star Wars Vehicles and Spacecraft, illus. Hans Jenssen and Richard Chasemore (New York: DK Publishing, 1998). Quotation from author blurb on dust jacket. UNINTENTIONAL SINS 261 details depicted—he is examining each drawing with great care. I sometimes try to skip a paragraph or two, since it seems to me you really just need to get the flavor of a book like this. But Sam, sensing my treachery, will give me a sharp, suspicious look. “Have you read everything on this page?” Abridgment is not an option. The thing about reading this book is that the text gives you—at one and the same time—both too much information and not enough. Too much information about each little component of the ships and not enough about the bigger picture, about the world in which they operate, about the way these ships participate in making meaning in a larger context. I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that reading Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections quite naturally makes me think about Leviticus. With Leviticus, as with Incredible Cross-Sections, you know that there is a larger frame of reference that makes sense of what you are reading, but you can’t quite get hold of the bigger picture. All you have are too many details and no way of organizing them into something sensible. All tree bark and no forest. Were the priests who wrote Leviticus to submit their manuscript for publication to one of the religious publishing houses today, I can well imagine the rejection letter: “Thank you for submitting your manuscript, ‘Leviticus.’ We’re afraid your work, while meticulous and carefully thought out in its own way, is not a good fit for the markets we serve. You might wish to consider se/f- publishing.” Apart from selective “prooftexting” on hot-button issues from the second half of the book, the Christian tradition has treated Leviticus as space travelers might treat a lifeless planet—it’s plotted on the navigational charts, but you wouldn’t actually want to go there. With a collectively wrinkled nose, we pass Leviticus quickly by, pressing on into other, more fertile parts of the Bible. Yet it won’t go away. Every time you open your Bible, it’s still there. And not only is it there, but it’s in the Pentateuch, arguably the center of the Old Testament, and not only is it in the Pentateuch, but it’s in the center of the Pentateuch. The Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser says, “Leviticus, more than any other [Old Testament] book, claims to be a divine word for humanity.”* If true, it seems impossibly true. How can we hear this word when the details are so overwhelming and esoteric and the big picture lies too far in the background? We must try to fill it in as best we can, from the texts of Leviticus itself and from other priestly texts. So here’s a thumbnail sketch: The world envisioned in Leviticus is an > Walter C. Kaiser, “The Book of Leviticus,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), 987. 262 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN orderly world, created and shaped by God’s purposes; a ritual world, in which creation itself is established, sustained, and restored through liturgies of worship; and it is a relational world, wherein God invites humanity to share in responsibility for the “maintenance, development, and restoration of God’s purposive designs for the universe.”? But—the world is subject to sin. When human beings commit moral or ritual sins, pollution, like an invisible, airborne, gooey miasma, adheres to the sanctuary. It is a kind of invisible dirt—invisible, but very real. If the sanctuary becomes too polluted with this goo, God will abandon it, with the resulting breach in the community’s life with God.* The entire community, not just the priests, must participate in keeping the sanctuary as pollution-free as possible—the life of the commu- nity depends on the extent to which this responsibility is shared. When they sin, the people must bring their gifts to the priest at the sanctuary, and through their sacrifice, the sanctuary can be adequately cleansed of the miasma, the goo, and the community will thrive.> Leviticus 4 is taken up with this problem of sin and its effects. Leviticus 1-3 dealt with voluntary gifts that were brought to the sanctuary, but chapters 4 and 5 prescribe mandatory gifts for the expiation of sin. They are addressed to the entire people, not simply to the priests.° “If anyone of the ordinary people among you sins uninten- tionally” you need to do something about it. Here is the first thing to notice about sin in Leviticus: sin is not about what it does to the individual. It is the sanctuary that requires attention. The forgiveness of the sinner is a byproduct of the sinner’s effort to address her sin, but her forgiveness is not of primary importance.’ She brings her gift to the priest in order to repair the relation- ship with God and help the community to prosper. So in Leviticus, sin is not about me as an individual, or about you as an individual, about the state of my soul or the state of yours, it’s about the health of the life of the community— whether the body as a whole will thrive, or not. In the priestly worldview, you can’t just turn off the TV when the images get too disturbing, when you most want to say, “That’s not about me.” It’s precisely those moments, Leviticus claims, that are most about you, and about me. 3 Samuel E. Balentine, The Torah’s Vision of Worship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 81. 4 Tbid., 150. 5 The most extensive work on Leviticus has been done by Jacob Milgrom. See his Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible, vol. 3) (New York: Doubleday, 1991), esp. 253-63, and his shorter commentary, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), esp. 8-16, 30-33. © Milgrom, Leviticus, 62. For a fascinating study of the postbiblical interpretation of Leviticus 4, see Gary A. Anderson, “The Interpretation of the Purification Offering (nexn) in the Temple Scroll (11 QTemple) and Rabbinic Literature,” Journal of Biblical Literature 111:1 (1992), 17-35. 7 Tbid., 30. UNINTENTIONAL SINS 263 In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers a fascinating, if breezy, theory of social change. Concerned to explain how certain social trends seem to take hold suddenly and seemingly inexplicably in the culture, that is, how they “tip,” Gladwell makes a strong claim that context shapes character much more than we generally are willing to acknowledge. He offers the example of crime in New York City. The crime rate in New York City plummeted in the 1990s, the apparent result of attention to the power of context. The police began to crack down on crimes always considered to be too minor to attend to previously: fare beating in the subways, public urination, and the like. The result was an environment that was not conducive to crime. People who would have committed crimes in a city that consistently allowed very minor crime did not commit crimes in a city that did not allow it. While Gladwell is open to charges of oversimplifying complex phenomena, he makes a claim that rings oddly true. Gladwell thinks character is not as stable or fixed as we often think. Rather, it is, he says, “like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circum- stances and context.” “The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character,” he says, “is that most of us are really good at controlling our environ- ment.”* And some people, of course, have more control over their environ- ments than do others. I was surprised, and a little alarmed, as I was reading along in Gladwell’s book, to find that his next example involved Princeton Theological Seminary. Two Princeton University psychologists conducted a “Good Samaritan” study some years ago. In this study, Princeton Seminary students were asked, individually, to deliver a prepared talk on a biblical theme. On the way to the talk each student encountered a person lying in an alley, groaning. Some students stopped to help the person in distress; some did not. What distin- guished those who stopped from those who kept walking? It was not the depth of their faith or the brand of their theological commitment, conser- vative, progressive, whatever. It was none of the things you might expect. The thing that distinguished those who stopped from those who kept walking was time. Of the students who were told by the researcher on their way out the door to give the talk that they had a few minutes to spare, 63 percent stopped for the distressed person. Of those who were told they were running late, only 10 percent stopped. The only thing that really distinguished the compassionate from the less compassionate was whether they were in a * Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 163. 264 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN hurry. I read this account in Gladwell with growing dismay, because I, like many of us zipping across campus to the next thing, am always in a hurry. Not surprisingly, reading Gladwell quite naturally made me think of Leviticus. “If anyone of the ordinary people among you sins unintention- ally. ...” In Leviticus, sins done knowingly are extremely serious but com- paratively rare. This brings us to the second thing to notice about sin in Leviticus: the vast majority of sins, according to Leviticus, are accidental, and the vast majority of the material in Leviticus that deals with sin is concerned with accidental, unintentional sins. When you think about the enormous number of intentional sins committed—and then you realize they are just a drop in the bucket compared with the number of unintentional sins commit- ted—it’s astounding to take in. Unintentional sins are those things we do that we don’t recognize as sinful, or things we don’t do, the omission of which we fail to perceive as sin. These are the common, persistent, everyday sins that threaten the life of the community. And, like the miasma that pollutes the sanctuary, unintentional sins are usually invisible but no less real and dam- aging. Preeminent Leviticus scholar Jacob Milgrom calls this the “ecology of morality,” where “the sins of the individual adversely affect one’s society even when committed inadvertently.”*° For the students in the study, being in a hurry became an unintentional sin that affected the way they treated other people. It made me wonder about our campus now. What benefits to ow common life might flow from a slower pace shared by all? A slow campus movement akin to the slow food move- ment? Or the way we speak to one another? If our speech always honored the dignity of every human person—in class and in the dining hall, in meetings and in offices? A recent editorial in the Christian Century laments not that there are difficult, divisive issues in the church and in society but that we have lost the capacity to speak to one another respectfully and civilly about those issues.'* What if we attended to the little, invisible details of our life togeth- er—to the environment in which we live and study and work—in such a way that character might be built up and community might flourish? ° Tbid., 163-67. After this sermon was preached, my colleague Robert Dykstra asked thoughtful questions that are worth reprinting here. Dykstra wonders what made it possible for the ro percent who helped the person in distress to defy the social norms of being on time for a talk? What internal strength made them capable of placing the value of helping the injured person above the value of punctuality? ‘© Thid., 16. Richard Nelson makes the same point from a different angle: “In the end, sacrifice was for Israel’s benefit, not for [God’s], and its overall goal was community” (Richard D. Nelson, Raising Up a Faithful Priest: Community and Priesthood in Biblical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993], 82). ™* “Noo Small Talk,” Christian Century (August 23, 2005), 5. ) ’ UNINTENTIONAL SINS 265 But let’s have an even bigger thought: what would the wor/d look like if we paid attention to the invisible, unintentional sins we commit? The silent sins of omission and commission? Some names come immediately to mind: Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Rwanda, AIDS, and now—New Orleans. Silent sins of omission and commission. The length of the list, and the anguish conjured by it, boggle the mind. Jacob Milgrom comments about the purification offering of Leviticus 4: “If only this ritual [this ritual!| were fully understood and implemented, it could transform the world.”’* Leviticus 4—tedious, pedantic Leviticus 4—fully understood and implemented, could transform the world. Leviticus and the table before us share much in common. The core assumption in Leviticus is that when one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers; when one part flourishes, all rejoice together (1 Cor. 12:26). Who would have thought that Leviticus would sound so much like Paul on a good day? In coming to this table, we are comforted that Christ has already bound us to himself and to one another. In coming to this table we are challenged to make that union visible in our life together and in the world. In coming to this table we are empowered to make it so. Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, gets it right, as usual, and so I end with his words: “God calls human persons to a life in which poverty is everyone’s poverty and wealth is everyone’s wealth ... When we celebrate the Holy Communion, we are not awarding each other points for good behaviour or orthodox teaching, but we are showing what it will be like in the Kingdom of Heaven—Christ’s life given equally to all as all share in one bread; every communicant called by name to God’s table, so that we have to look at every other communicant as God’s beloved guest. Out of this flows the vision of a renewed world. .. .”*3 That, quite naturally, makes me think of Leviticus. Amen. * Milgrom, Leviticus, 3 a. 3 Rowan Williams, “Archbishop of Canterbury’s Beatie Address at ACC-13,” Anglican Communion News Service, 3991 (June 20, 2005). The Task of New Dr. Leander Keck is Winkley Professor of Biblical Theology Emeritus at Yale Uni- ‘Testament Christology ‘i versity Divinity School. He delivered this lecture on October 3, 2005, in the Mackay by LEANDER E. KECK Campus Center. iE ORDER TO speak properly about Jesus in New Testament Christology today, the task must be redefined as a theological discipline. That is what the whole series intends to demonstrate. So this lecture, too, has a task: first, to show why NT Christology must be redefined; second, to analyze the rationale of Christology as such; and third, to apply that rationale to the study of NT Christology. Thereby this pre- sentation will set the direction for those that follow. The second lecture explores “Jesus and God’s Rectitude (Righteousness)” in Romans; the third discusses “Jesus and our Rectitude” in Matthew; the fourth traces “Jesus and the Exegesis of God” in John. The fifth draws out some implications for “The Task of the Interpreter.” It will help us understand why NT Christology must be redefined as a theological discipline if we look briefly at what has brought us to the point where this redefinition is necessary. In a word, it is the desire to have Jesus without Christology. Jesus Without Christology First of all, the idea that we can, and should, have Jesus without NT Christology—indeed, without Christology altogether—is intelligible in light of the setting in which it emerged: the disintegration of Christendom in the West. It is doubtful that the idea would have been understood, much less championed, before the Enlightenment or would be plausible even today where some form of Christendom still remains. And it would make no sense at all where Christianity is thriving through conversions. It is mostly amid Christendom’s remnants that we find the desire to have Jesus without Chris- tology in order to be attracted to him or be inspired by him; in Asia, where there has never been a Christendom, many follow the teachings of Jesus but reject Christianity as a foreign religion. In the West, it is not only persons wholly unrelated to the church who find Jesus more attractive, more chal- lenging morally, without Christology, but also many church Christians as well. For both, Christology simply interferes with their appreciation of Jesus ‘The Stone Lectures for 2005 were titled “Jesus in New Testament Christology.” Printed here is the first lecture, adapted for publication. THE TASK OF NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY 267 and devotion to him. We need not decide whether this attitude, commonly more assumed than asserted, is so widespread because the churches have neglected teaching and interpreting NT Christology or because they taught it as required answers without the questions. In any case, even if the various renewal movements within the mainline denominations insist on retaining classical Christology, the “Jesuology” of some kinds of popular Christianity also separates Jesus from Christology. One should not underestimate the power of looking to Jesus without Christology. Nor should one overlook the fact that given the collapse of Christendom’s support of Christianity, the enduring interest in Jesus is a phenomenon well worth exploring in detail— but not here. Given the symbiotic relation between Christianity and Western culture to which the word “Christendom” refers, the relentless rise of the scientific worldview destroyed the worldview in which Christology was embedded and reversed the way the Western mind viewed reality. As Hans Frei pointed out, instead of viewing reality through the lens of Christian thought, people increasingly looked at the lens in light of science, and discarded it, and often rejected the whole conceptual framework within which Christology had functioned. Now, Adam did not “fall”; rather, Homo sapiens rose (evolved). Heaven and hell are not places of reward and punishment after death but metaphors for what we create in this earthly life. Gone were the metaphysics and ontology on which the doctrine of the two natures of Christ had relied. The Old Testament neither predicted Jesus nor portrayed typologically the atonement—an idea now judged unworthy of God in any case. Author George Eliot, the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, said that while she admired the teachings of Jesus, she considered “the system of doctrines, built upon the facts of his life and... drawn . . . from Jewish notions . . . to be the most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in their influence on indi- vidual and social happiness.”* She spoke for a growing number of opinion makers who were not content to let Christian theology wither away but who were determined to cut it down—while at the same time salvaging Jesus by separating him from the Christology that had explained why he is important. What Eliot expressed was not new, for already the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Deists were beginning to distinguish the reasonable re- ligion that they said Jesus taught from what the Gospels claim he taught. Ever since, it became increasingly self-evident that finding the real Jesus requires detaching him from the church’s Christology, beginning with the NT. Historical criticism, though no longer Deist, completed what the Deists * Quoted from A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 145. 268 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN began, by subjecting the Gospels, as well as the sources behind them, to rigorous analysis in order to recover and reconstruct “the historical Jesus.” Inevitably, it became commonplace to regard those passages in which Jesus explicitly interprets his mission in Christological terms as coming not from Jesus at all but from the church. Also set aside were the stories that are transparently Christological—especially the birth accounts, the transfigura- tion, and the resurrection. If classical Christology was too metaphyscial to be credible, the Christology of the Gospels was too mythological. The religion of Jesus has come to be deemed more compelling than the Christian religion about him. Many would agree with what a Chicago theologian said a century ago: “I am not obligated to believe anything about Jesus that he did not believe about himself.” That was surely the view of the liberal Baptist preacher whom I once heard recite the Nicene Creed and then ask, “Can you imagine Jesus saying that?” Where such attitudes prevail, Jesus without Christology is not mourned as a loss but celebrated as a liberation. In recent years, the separation of Jesus from Christology has been abetted by an additional factor: moral outrage against all forms of injustice and oppression with which the church’s Christology has been linked. Whereas the Enlightenment-generated separation of Jesus from Christology was based on the claim of superior knowledge, this recent stance, being based on superior morality, now makes the separation a moral task. At work in this turn are the insights from the sociology of knowledge, which exposed the correlation between ideas and the socioeconomic status of those who use them. Accordingly, the avant garde began analyzing Christology, including that in the NT, for the ways it was used to buttress injustice—for its relation to power, not only in Christendom’s church but also in Christianity itself. Some now accuse Christianity of betraying Jesus through its Christology, whether by proclaiming Christ as Lord or by urging the already downtrod- den to live like the humble, patiently suffering Jesus. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, for example, claims that “the deformation [his italics] of Jesus is astounding. The nonviolent Jewish Jesus who taught love of enemies, revealed a nonviolent God, and inspired alternatives to the domi- nation system within history, became God’s murderous apocalyptic accom- plice who would return to violently judge and crush enemies and all evildoers at the end of history”; indeed, “a compassionate God is incompatible with all atonement theories.”+ Animus against the atonement is now common. Thus, 3 Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus Against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus (Harris- burg: Trinity Press International, 2001), 186. 4 Thid., 224. THE TASK OF NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY 269 Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza claims that what the church’s Christology emphasized Jesus eschewed, because his God “did not demand human sac- rifice to appease his wrath.”> Rosemary Reuther salvaged Jesus from NT Christology, claiming that “once the mythology about Jesus as Messiah and divine Logos, with its masculine imagery, is stripped off, the Jesus of the synoptic gospels can be recognized as a figure remarkably compatible with feminism.”° Schiissler Fiorenza found enough “remnants of the nonpatriar- ” chal early Christian ethos”’ to say “the praxis and vision of Jesus,” when carefully placed in his own situation, “presented an alternative option to the dominant patriarchal structure of his time.”* In short, the salvaged Jesus was a fleeting moment whose decisive qualities fortunately were not erased completely by the Gospels. As a result, the ministry of Jesus was Camelot. When one surveys the long history of separating Jesus from Christology, a persistent pattern emerges: the separated Jesus always agrees with those who do the separating. Because he is like us in aspiration, only more so, he challenges us to do better, but he seldom offends. Nor does portraying him in his own setting yield anything ambiguous about him. Somehow, the otherwise acknowledged traits of history—its enigmatic and elusive charac- ter, its ultimately baffling mystery, its impenetrability, its cunning way of producing unintended consequences, its sheer otherness—do not apply to the historian’s Jesus. Jesus always achieves his aim of actualizing God’s reign where he is, albeit only briefly and only with a few. Nor do we find serious efforts to account historically for his capacity to do this. Because this Jesus is portrayed as simultaneously fully situated in his time, yet thoroughly excep- tional where it matters, one can ask whether this historiography might not produce unwittingly a Jesus with docetic traits. In any case, the attempts to rescue Jesus from Christology have failed because often the way Jesus was portrayed smuggled another, unacknowledged, Christology into the por- trayal. At this point, some Latin American liberation theologians were wiser. Like Jesus, they identified with the destitute and exploited, whose plight they blamed largely on Christendom’s church, accusing it of complicity with “the powers that maintained the established order that was inhumane because it > Elizabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 130. ° Rosemary Radfor Reuther, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 135. ; 7 Schiissler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 35. 8 Thid., 107. 270 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN involved the enslavement of entire peoples.”° For those theologians, the Jesus of history “unmasks the oppressor and liberates the oppressed.”*° They did not, however, reject Christology or look for salvageable fragments of the tradition. Rather, they insisted that Christology must not bypass the life, teachings, and deeds of Jesus, as do the creeds, but make them central. Indeed, in Leonardo Boff’s book, Jesus Christ Liberator, one sees a Christol- ogy in which the life, teachings, and praxis of Jesus are inseparable from the church’s classical Christology, Chalcedon included.** In a later essay, Boff said this book expressed his conviction that “the humanity of Jesus . . . was God praesens”'*—a remarkable restatement of the two natures Christology. These theologians did not find it necessary to separate Jesus from Christol- ogy in order to follow his way and heed his word in promoting the cause of justice. In short, the drive to separate Jesus from Christology is largely a parochial phenomenon at home in the post-Christendom West, where it is an afford- able luxury. But elsewhere, whether in Asia or Africa, followers of Jesus cannot give up Christology so easily, for often they must answer the question, “Just what is so special about Jesus that you align your life with his, even if it costs you family ties and perhaps life itself?” But even in the post-Christen- dom West, where allegiance to Jesus may be odd but not life-threatening, that question cannot be evaded permanently. The Christology of the tradi- tion, beginning with the NT, offers a way of answering it. To understand what it offers, we turn to the rationale of Christology. Christology and Its Rationale Christian theology has solidified the definition of Christology as the doctrine of the person and work of Christ. Luther’s associate, Melanchthon, simplified matters—probably too much—by saying that to know Christ is to know his benefits. Nonetheless, this Reformer did identify the motor that drives Christology, for it is the experienced impact of Christ that prompts and sustains the need to know who it is that generates and sustains this experience and what there is about him that enables him to do so. When Christology is looked at this way, in terms of what it does, it soon becomes 9 Raul Vidales, “How Should We Speak of Christ Today?” in The Faces of fesus: Latin American Christologies, ed. Jose Miguez Bonino (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1984), 139. ‘© ]. Severino Croatto, “The Political Dimension of Christ the Liberator,” in The Faces of Jesus, 115. ** Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1978.) "2 Leonardo Boff, “Images of Jesus in Brazilian Liberal Christianity,” in The Faces of Fesus, 24. THE TASK OF NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY 271 apparent that the traditional definition—the doctrine of the person and work of Christ—lacks precision, because the little word “and” is not sufficient to indicate how the work is grounded in the person. Unless and until that grounding is made clear, we do not yet have Christology but only the makings of one. And in explaining how the benefits of Christ are grounded in his person or identity, Christology reasons according to a clear, consistent rationale. This rationale can be understood as a secondary language used to clarify, and sometimes critique, the primary language that believers use to express their response to the Gospel, itself a Christologically saturated announce- ment of the significance of Jesus. In other words, Christology is language about language, the language of reflection on the language of confession. Whereas the language of confession can be exclamatory (as in “Maranatha!” [Our Lord, come!] or “Jesus is cool!”), the language of reflection is explanatory and so requires more-complex sentences than “Jesus is Lord.” Accordingly, it is instructive to look more closely at a Christology sentence. To begin with, a sentence has a syntax, an acknowledged structure that coordinates its various parts in order to coherently convey an assertion. Moreover, the syntax instantiates the grammar of a particular language within which various kinds of sentences are possible. So, too, Christology has a syntax that governs the way its parts are related to form an intelligible whole that is understood by users of the language. Thus, we can say that usually a complete Christology sentence will have a subject naming the doer (God or Christ), a verb stating the action (saves, redeems, reveals), and adverbial word or phrase naming the way the action occurred (“through” Jesus or an aspect of Jesus, such as the cross), a direct object saying what the action achieves (redemption, eternal life), and an indirect object specifying who benefits (pri- marily humans); sometimes the beneficiary is expressed as the direct object. It is through the syntax that governs a Christology sentence that the content of any Christology is expressed. Looking at Christology this way gets us beyond seeing it as a set of doctrines, because it allows us to see that Christology is a statement, an assertion that explains what Christ does and why he can do it. In other words, it is what Christology does that shows what it is and why it is important. Now we can reformulate the two foci of Christology, the person and work of Christ. Instead of discussing the person in terms of his divinity or dual natures, we will focus on his identity centered in his relation to God, for it is this unique relationship that enables him to achieve his work. The core of this identity, however expressed, is the theological correlate of Christology. Like- wise, we will discuss the work of Christ as the anthropological/soteriological B72 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN correlate in order to identify just what he does that transforms or heals the human dilemma. It is necessary to use the rather cumbersome phrase “an- thropological/soteriological” because the one must fit the other. The anthro- pological side expresses the human dilemma, and the soteriological, its resolution. The cure must fit the disease. Thus, if the human plight is mortality, the solution is not being forgiven but being made immortal. Above all, in a coherent Christology these two correlates—the explicitly theological and the anthropological/soteriological—always work in tandem; each re- quires the other, and neither is adequate by itself. (Christ’s relation to the cosmos is part of the theological correlate; his relation to the church is part of the anthropological/soteriological correlate.) Once we see how Christology works, it is clear why the mere “and” that links the person and work of Christ is inadequate. Indeed, their dependence on each other can be expressed this way: according to the rationale of Christology, the theological correlate (the person of Christ) makes the anthropological/soteriological correlate (the work of Christ) possible, and the anthropological/soteriological makes the theological correlate necessary. By looking at what each part of Christology says about Christ, and by noting how the parts work together, we can also see Christology as an integrated whole statement. Seeing it whole allows us to see also two other things that should not be overlooked. First, because the two correlates work in tandem, each in relation to the other, we note that the deeper the human dilemma is, the “higher” the Christology must be to deal with it. Conversely, a superficial anthropology requires only a “low” Christology. Second, once we grasp Christology whole, one can infer the entire Christology even if only part of it is expressed in a given text, just as a physical anthropologist can infer the skeleton from one or two excavated bones. This is the reason one can infer the Christology that is unintentionally smuggled into many recon- structed lives of Jesus. This formal analysis, which applies to any Christology, is not as compli- cated as it may sound, for it is all rather obvious when you think about it. But sometimes the obvious needs to be said, especially as we now turn to Christology in the NT, for it is this formal analysis that enables us to see NT Christology as a theological enterprise. NT Christology as a Theological Discipline Although all NT writings are Christological to some degree, apart from Hebrews, most of them do not contain a major section devoted to Christol- ogy as a discrete topic. Frequently, what is said about Christ and the salvation THE TASK OF NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY 273 he effects provides the warrant for an exhortation. We also find a bewildering variety. In addition to Christology-laden stories within the Christology- permeated Gospel narratives, the epistles contain brief confessional formulas and hymnic passages that celebrate an aspect of Christ or salvation as well as prose arguments in which Christ is the pivot. We also find various titles used for Christ, such as Lord, Son of Man, and High Priest, as well as metaphors, such as pioneer, lamb, and light, each of which can be analyzed by following the rationale of Christology. In addition, there are OT quotations, as well as Stoic language, understood as references to Christ. Also the work of Christ is expressed in diverse images—such as new birth, victory, justification, and atonement—each implying the corresponding image of the human plight. Moreover, we also find that each text has its own way of viewing Jesus overall, such as “agent” or “mediator,” which some have called “models” of Chris- tology. In short, what we find is so heterogeneous in form and content that many have concluded that there is no such thing as NT Christology but only multiple Christologies partly expressed and never systematized. But by using the pair of correlates as a heuristic device, this material can be studied in a theologically coherent way. In fact, this heuristic device makes it possible to redefine the study of NT Christology as a theological discipline. This redefinition entails emancipation from the legacy of William Wrede. In an essay written over a century ago but available in English only seven decades later, Wrede said that “New Testament theology makes doctrine out of what in itself is not doctrine,”*? and then went on to say that NT theology, including of course Christology, should be abandoned. Instead, scholars should recover “what was believed, thought, taught, hoped, required and striven for” in the whole of earliest Christianity, not only in the NT.*+ What Wrede called for generally, Wilhelm Bousset carried out in Christology. On the eve of the First World War, he published Kyrios Christos, with the subtitle, A History of Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus.*> The successor to Bousset’s is the recent book by Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.*° No one will deny that a great deal has been learned—and unlearned— about the history of early Christian thought in its environment or that *3 William Wrede, “The Task and Methods of ‘New Testament Theology,” in Robert Morgan, The Nature of New Testament Theology: The Contribution of William Wrede and Adolf Schlatter (Naperville: Alec R. Allenson, 1973). "4 Thid., 84-85. ‘5 The English translation of the revised 1921 edition was published by Abingdon Press in 1970. ; oe ay W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). 274 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN reconstructing that history is essential for understanding Christology in the NT. Nonetheless, Christology as a theological enterprise is not the same as the history of early Christology. Each has its own legitimate questions, methods, and tasks. To oversimplify, the historian’s task is to explain how things—including ideas—came to be what they were, by looking for historical causes and effects, including key persons (such as Paul) and the influences that affected them and that flowed from them. The theologian’s task is to understand concepts and coherences by looking for /ogical causes and conse- quences. Moreover, whereas historical inquiry accents the particular and unrepeatable events, theological analysis seeks the enduring rationale in the specific and unique. If historical study is concerned with the origin and development of Christological ideas and motifs, theological study concen- trates on the subject matter itself, die Sache, of NT Christology, the work of Christ as grounded in the person of Christ. Consequently, when the study of NT Christology became the study of the history of Christological ideas, words, titles, motifs, influences, and the like, the rationale of Christology as theology was lost, and apart from Bultmann’s magisterial yet problematic work, NT Christology ceased to be what it ought to have been, that is, a historically informed theological discipline. It is difficult, however—and perhaps impossible—to move from a strictly historical enterprise to the theological one (unless they are equated at the outset), for pursuing history leads to more history, not naturally to theology. If NT Christology is to be a theological enterprise, albeit historically informed, it must be so from the start. As envisioned here, a historically informed theological study of NT Chris- tology has three distinguishing traits. First, it is the study of NT texts. After all, they are the only thing that exists. Everything else must be reconstructed (and at points even the texts must be reconstructed). This emphasis on texts is not as self-evident as it may seem, because it excludes three other emphases that have taken its place. New Testament Christology is not the Christology of the sources that the Gospel writers probably used, such as Q or the so-called “Signs Gospel” some have detected in John, for they exist only as recon- structions based on inferences from the texts. Never do the authors point out that they are using, summarizing, or quoting their sources, as many ancient writers did. To the extent that one can speak of the Christology of such sources, it belongs to the history of early Christology and should not get a separate section in the Christology of the NT. New Testament Christology is not the Christology of individual authors, for there is no evidence that any of them put everything he thought about Christ and his significance into the text before us. Paul is no exception; indeed, the uniqueness of each of his THE TASK OF NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY 275 letters actually confirms this observation. If we had only one of his writings, as we do with other NT authors, we would surely draw the wrong conclu- sions about the Christology of the apostle. If we had only 1 Thessalonians and someone discovered Romans, many would insist that it is so different that Paul could not have written it, and vice versa. New Testament Christology is not the Christology of distinct Christian communities, like the original Jerusa- lem believers or Christians in Antioch and Ephesus. That there were distinct streams in early Christianity that varied from place to place is clear from Paul’s tensions with the Jerusalem church. Still, one has only to recall how difficult it is to describe what is called “Jewish Christianity” in order to realize how precarious it is to identify its distinctive Christology. But again, even if that were possible, the result would belong to the history of early Christology and not to the Christology of the NT itself. Second, as a theological discipline, it is not only the student who is historically informed, for NT Christology itself is actually historically in- formed throughout. This is because in the readers’ circumstances addressed in the text, some aspects of the human plight instantiate the anthropological/ soteriological correlate. Relying on this correlate does not obscure the cir- cumstances but allows their theological significance to be identified more clearly. Indeed, at just this point, NT Christology becomes particularly interesting and historical work, more significant, because the community for which Matthew was written found itself in circumstances like those of John’s readers, yet these Gospels portray Jesus quite differently. The Christologies of these two contemporary Gospels cannot be understood by simply collect- ing information about their language, possible sources, and the history of their leading ideas; understanding both requires attending also to the readers of both texts. In short, NT Christology itself is historically informed because the readers, as well as the authors, were historically formed. The readers’ formation includes what they knew and thought about Jesus before they read the texts we study—although just what they knew and thought often is exceedingly difficult to delineate.'” Still, because the readers were already informed about Christ and committed to him, the authors did not say everything they thought about Christ. As 1 Corinthians shows, Paul thought the readers were misinterpreting what they knew, but that misun- derstanding too belongs to the history of early Christology and is part of the Christology of the NT only as the issue that evoked Paul’s written response. ‘7 See, for example, Leander E. Keck, “‘Jesus’ in Romans,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 443-60. 276 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Moreover, because every Christology in the NT is historically informed where the writer and his traditions intersect the readers’ understanding, our being historically informed as we study that Christology invites us to see how the author thinks as a theologian under pressure. That, in turn, invites us—in our own intersections—to think with him as we read what he wrote. Whether we think the way the author does or agree with what he thinks, thinking with him enhances our own capacity to think theologically about the same subject matter. Third, as a historically informed theological discipline, NT Christology remains focused on the event of Jesus without requiring that every theolog- ical assertion about his identity and import be first certified historically. That the historical study of Jesus does verify—if one may use that word here— certain aspects of his context, activity, and teaching are of course not unim- portant, even though much of that history ranges from the possible to the plausible to the probable to the virtually certain. What is really important is this: if NT Christology is indeed a theological discipline, one must think theologically about the whole Jesus event, even if it is but partly known and historically verified. What finally matters is whether NT Christology is consistent with what probably can be known about the Jesus of history. Above all, we must remember that according to both the historical evidence and the rationale of Christology, there never was a non-Christological Jesus, for he understood himself to have both a theological and an anthropological/ soteriological correlate, because his grasp of God’s kingship, which surfaced in the way he addressed the human plight as he encountered it, reflected his own relation to God. Therefore, to speak of “Jesus in NT Christology” is not to speak of him in alien territory where he has been victimized by Christian devotion but exactly where he belongs. 1 111 1 Marjorie Thompson is director of the Celtic Spirituality and Pathways Center for Spiritual Leadership the Divine Feminine at The Upper Room in Nashville, Tennes- see. She is the author of Family, the by MARJORIE J. THOMPSON Forming Center and Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life. She delivered this Women in Church and Ministry (WICAM) lecture in Miller Chapel on March 30, 2005. CONFESS AT THE outset that I selected this topic by a rare intuitive ke Little did I know the scope of the subject I had assigned myself. By any scholarly measure, I am qualified to address neither Celtic spirituality nor the Divine Feminine. But God has a fine sense of humor and a habit of challenging me beyond my comfort zone. So I am obliged to trust that God may guide you to some deeper insight this evening, either through or in spite of my words. The subjects we are drawn to promise in some way to illuminate our personal lives and deeper questions. For me this topic is no exception. My father was the firstborn child of an itinerant Irish preacher who emigrated to Canada and brought his fiancée to join him after a seven-year engagement. I still recall my grandmother’s soft Irish brogue and gentle, earthy humor. Digging into the soil of Celtic Christianity has been, in part, an excavation of ancestral spiritual roots. Yet my initial attraction to Celtic spirituality came from linking the sacramental sensibility of the Celtic tradition to that of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, whose theological affirmation of sacred depth within the created order was an epiphany to me in my seminary years. I felt drawn to explore possible connections between the Eastern Church and the furthest Western outpost of European Christendom: the Celtic lands of Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, and Wales. There is also a growing awareness in my spirit of need for the Sacred Feminine. I know, of course, that as Spirit, God has no gender and that human language concerning the divine is forever inadequate. For years I have trained myself to use inclusive language concerning God, mastering odd and passive linguistic constructions to do so. I am cognizant of occasional scrip- tural references to God’s maternal attributes, by which it is allowable to say, for example, “God is like a mother eagle protecting her young,” or to point out that when Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son, the father—who clearly represents God—is more like a Jewish mama than a typical Mediter- ranean patriarch zealously guarding his honor and reputation. 278 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN But the implacable impress of masculine language and imagery surround- ing God in Christian scripture, tradition, and liturgy has slowly worn me down over the years. We may say, “God is /ike a woman who sweeps her house until she finds her lost coin,” but the only direct names for God we corporately accept are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and even the Spirit is consistently referred to as “he.” This despite the fact that the Hebrew word for God’s spirit or breath—ruach—is feminine. Occasionally this has been picked up in the tradition: one of the early Syriac fathers spoke of God as Father and the Holy Spirit as Mother.* The ways we name and image God have profound consequences for our prayer life. So although intellectually I know that God is beyond gender, emotionally and spiritually my sense of God in prayer has retained a distinctly masculine cast. Slowly, I have realized that I am seeking what many women before me have sought: the Divine Feminine within the Godhead, not mere analogies with the created feminine in the natural order. Until I perceive in my spirit the feminine within the Divine, I do not see the whole of my created being reflecting the image of a whole God. I cannot find myself, as woman, in God. And this shapes my prayer in a thousand ways, mostly unconscious. Exposure to the Celtic tradition of prayer has begun to loosen my images of God, world, and self. The richness of language, symbol, and imagination in Celtic spirituality is doing a mysterious work of reconstruction inside me. I trust this to be a labor of grace, something I hope to share with you. In my explorations, I have discovered two keys to the Sacred Feminine in Celtic spirituality. One is precisely the sacredness of creation—a sacramental view of matter. The second is the powerful role of imagination in weaving myth, symbol, and ordinary life into poetry, art, story, and song. In these, I believe, the feminine dimensions of divine life find expression in human life. More- over, it is clear that pre-Christian Celtic culture sets the stage for accepting feminine traits at the heart of cosmic reality and that the valuing of the Sacred Feminine was mirrored in a society according greater respect and freedom to women for many centuries than could have been found virtually anywhere on the greater European Continent. To set the context, then, let us take a brief romp from matriarchy to modernity in Celtic culture. * Aphrahat “speaks of the believer's love for God” in these terms. See Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 42. The Syriac tradition bears more affinity with Christianity’s Semitic roots than with Greek influences. QE Ce Siete PROLAI Ie Ye 279 CELTIC CULTURE: FROM MATRIARCHY TO MODERNITY In early Celtic creation myths the Creator Deity is a Mother Goddess, Danu, translated “waters from heaven.” The earliest known Celtic society developed at the headwaters of the Danube River, named for her. About 1000 BC, Celts began to spread through Europe all the way to the Western Isles, where their culture, largely insulated from outside influences, maintained its distinctive character far longer than it did elsewhere. Part of that character was matriarchy. Peter Beresford Ellis, in his book Celtic Women, sets the stage: “For the pagan Celt, the essence of the universe and all its creativity was female. The mother goddess, and all her personifications of fertility, sovranty, love and healing, was an essential basis of their very role in the world.”* In Irish mythology, goddesses held preeminence over gods, probably because agriculture and the arts were first in the hands of women. The most popular aspect of the mother goddess in Ireland was the goddess Brigid, known to the Roman occupiers as Britannia, goddess of sovereignty. (“Hail, Britannia!” expresses the feminine personification of the English mother- land.) Brigid, like many other Celtic gods and goddesses, had a triune function: she was goddess of fertility, healing, and poetry—all high values in this rural, agrarian, and oral culture. Brigid was one of the major powers behind the native Irish legal code known as the Brehon Laws. In an effort to balance the needs and rights of men and women in a harmonious order, early Celtic societies created a very different social struc- ture from other cultures of their time—notably Roman, Greek, and Middle Eastern—which generally embodied authoritarian male dominance. By con- trast, women in Celtic societies “could govern, took prominent roles in political, religious and artistic life, even becoming judges and law-givers; they could own property which marriage could not deprive them of; they chose when they wanted to marry, and more often than not, who ... ; they could divorce and, if they were deserted, molested, or maltreated, they had the right to claim considerable damages.” Of course, this degree of freedom and autonomy was relative, and laws favorable to women were not always applied. Yet without romanticizing Celtic culture, we can recognize that its women enjoyed a sphere of influence more liberal than in other contemporary societies, and that was remarkable for its time. * Peter Beresford Ellis, Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1995), 37. 3 Tbid., 18. 280 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Time, naturally, brought change. The matri-centered society of the Celts began to shift several centuries before the birth of Christ, through interaction with Greek and Roman cultures. Patriarchy overtook matriarchy, father gods began replacing mother gods, and new mythologies—in which goddesses were raped, producing warrior hero offspring—emerged. Celtic scholar Mary Condren notes that as the status of goddesses was defiled by the symbol of rape, “warrior society triumphed over the culture of the wise women.”* There is great debate as to whether the introduction of Christianity improved the lot of women in Celtic societies. Peter Beresford Ellis con- cludes that it did not. It is hard to imagine that St. Augustine’s incalculable influence could have contributed much to genuine honor or respect for women. Augustine taught, “The woman herself alone is not the image of God; whereas the man alone is the image of God as fully and completely as when the woman is joined with him.” He was by no means alone among influential theologians in expressing such views. It is likely Christianity has done little to help the status of women until quite recent times. Yet Celtic women played a significant role in the spread of Christianity after St. Patrick began his mission in Ireland around AD 430. Many believed the Celts took to Christianity as if their pagan formation had deliberately prepared them for it, a belief held by many. According to former warden of Iona Abbey Philip Newell, “The gospel was seen as fulfilling rather than destroying the old Celtic mythologies. A sixth-century bard claimed that Christ had always been the Celt’s teacher, but they had not known him by name. ... The gospel was like a grace of self-revelation.”* Celts readily absorbed Trinitarian theology, having already a proclivity for triads and triune formulas. They took to Christ as their “Chief Druid.” When Mary was proclaimed the Mother of God at the council of Ephesus in 431 AD, Celts turned to her as the eternal mother figure, the natural fulfillment of the ancient mother goddess. As Christianity gained acceptance and was gradually enculturated into its new setting, it took on several distinctively Celtic expressions. Early Celtic Christianity was essentially monastic, strongly shaped by the desert monasticism translated to Western Europe through John Cassian. It was an ascetic and penitential spirituality yet did not assume all the forms of its Mediterranean roots. Because Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were rural areas without urban centers, monastic foundations were largely based on 4 Mary Condren, The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland, cited in Beresford Ellis, Celtic Women, 31. 5 J. Philip Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1997), 27-28. CELTIC SPIRITUALITY 281 kinship and tribe and looked like small villages. Dual monasteries, or mixed religious houses with men and women, were not unusual; they lived in separate housing with a common enclosure. Because clan and family life were the norm, religious men and women in these monasteries often married and had children. Monastic dedication evidently did not imply celibacy. A classic Irish literary piece featuring women’s complaints against men contains a choice rhyme on the subject: Another thing Id like to mention That’s beyond my comprehension— Whatever made the Church create A clergy that is celibate?® Irish law provided for the rights of married clergy, and noncelibate clergy lasted in Wales even up to the Reformation. Here was a unique expression of monasticism rooted in Celtic cultural norms and values. A few women who established monastic foundations, such as St. Brigid (named after the goddess, because she was a female Druid before her conversion), may have been ordained as priests and even given episcopal authority. There is evidence, hotly disputed by some scholars, that Brigid of Kildare and Beverly of York were consecrated as bishops, although it is possible they exercised administrative rather than sacramental duties. The leadership roles of women in the Celtic church were sharply criticized by Roman Christians. Catholic bishops at Tours complained to two Breton priests: “You celebrate the divine sacrifice of the Mass with the assistance of women to whom you give the name conhospitae . . . renounce these abuses!”” The term conhospitae seems to have referred both to mixed religious houses and to deaconesses who had a liturgical role in the Eucharist.* Clearly, both strict celibacy and the concept of the inferiority of women were foreign to early Celtic Christianity, yet both began to permeate the Celtic church with Rome’s spreading influence across late medieval Europe. As women’s freedoms in early Celtic culture were slowly curtailed, the doors of coequal leadership with men in the church gradually closed. Indeed, Celtic culture was eroded by various invasions and constrictions until its wholesale destruction was attempted—in Ireland, through the seventh cen- tury; Cromwellian colonization and eighteenth-century penal laws; and in © David Marcus’s translation from The Midnight Court, cited in Beresford Ellis, Celtic Women, 250. ‘ Beresford Ellis, Celtic Women, 142. ® See Timothy J. Joyce, OSB, Celtic Christianity: A Sacred Tradition, a Vision of Hope (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), 22. 282 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN the Western Isles, through the Highland clearances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The histories of Scotland and Ireland are scarred with suffering and humiliation at the hands of more powerful cul- tures. Yet something deeply rooted in the Celtic psyche has remained alive well into modern times, as we shall see. The paradigm of women as agents of power in their own right, not merely as accoutrements to male power, was undoubtedly grounded in the ancient goddess tradition, where the power of the Divine Feminine was culturally explicit. 1 would suggest that after the enculturation of Christianity in Celtic lands, the power of the Sacred Feminine became implicit in several ways: first, in the deeply embedded affinity for the earth and all creation; and second, in the irrepressible celebration of the religious imagination. Both themes are consistently expressed in Celtic prayer. So we turn next to the sacred heart of creation in Celtic spirituality. Celtic Spirituality and the Sacred Heart of Creation It is only natural that a rural agrarian culture would hold the earth with its creatures, cycles, and seasons in high esteem. Human reverence for the natural world is common to every native religion, and a sense of sacred power located within nature is prominent in many world religions. The Hebrew religion set itself precisely in opposition to such pagan religions, and Chris- tianity followed. This raises for us the question of how we understand the relationship between Creator and creation. Hebrew religion was concerned to maintain an absolute and clear distinction between the two, as Israel was surrounded by fertility cults in the ancient world. Christian theology has likewise guarded the transcendence of God by drawing sharp distinctions between Creator and creature. God is holy, and we are not. Sacredness is an attribute of heaven alone; earth is the fallen realm of sin and death. In the Christian West, nature and grace came to be defined as entirely separate spheres. Grace was God’s gift from above to heal and redeem fallen nature. Thus, the spiritual life began when you turned your eyes away from this world to the world above. In contrast, one of the strongest features of Celtic Christianity was its view of creation as a sacrament of God’s grace. Perhaps the best way to grasp this is to listen to portions of writing from several Celtic teachers and theologians. The first would be Pelagius, that much maligned originator of the heresy named after him. Pelagius was a fourth-century Celtic monk, a contemporary of St. Augus- tine who successfully charged him with heresy, even after one pope had CEE TEC SPIRITUALITY 283 declared Pelagius’s teachings entirely true and orthodox. “Pelagius saw God as present within all that has life.”? He maintained that everywhere, “narrow shafts of divine light pierce the veil that separates heaven from earth.” In a letter he invites a friend to observe the animals, birds, insects, fish, trees and crops, affirming that God’s spirit dwells within each one. “There is no creature on earth in whom God is absent,” he says. “When God pronounced that his creation was good, it was not only that his hand had fashioned every creature; it was that his breath had brought every creature to life. ... The presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beauti- ful. ...”"° Pelagius believed that the command to love our neighbor as ourselves included as neighbors all the creatures around us. Two teachings that put Pelagius in the way of particular criticisms were: (1) his commitment to teaching women to read scripture, which drew fire from the Bible scholar Jerome; and (2) his conviction that the image of God could be seen in the face of the newborn child. These convictions were not unrelated. In keeping with Celtic values, Pelagius saw the original goodness of God’s image not only in the newborn but also as fully in women as in men. He did not deny that sin distorts the image of God in human beings but believed that the deeper goodness of God still resided within, waiting to be released by grace. Grace did not replace nature but cooperated with our truest God-given nature. Pelagius did not believe that an infant was conceived in sin but that a child newly born radiated the original goodness of God’s creation. This put him at direct odds with Augustine, whose emphasis on original sin and human depravity led him to conclude that the very act of procreation passes sin from one generation to the next. Every child is thus born in sin, which is sexually transmitted like a disease. The Celtic church found Augustine’s teaching on this point abhorrent to its whole spiritual sensibility, a matter we are more likely to agree with today. James Mackey, from the Divinity Faculty of the University of Edinburgh, has this to say concerning the controversy: “For Pelagius all of God’s creation, all and everything that comes into being by God’s continuous creation is good. Nothing that enters the realm of reality by the universal process of bodily becoming can be evil or sinful by that very fact. ... Everything that comes into existence is good, and especially the ° Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God, 11. *° Quotations from Pelagius are found in the Letters PP Ueitas cited in Listening for the Heartbeat of God, 10-11. 284 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN newly conceived human being with its will for life, . . . for God is constantly and creatively at work in all that comes to be.”"* The Celtic emphasis on the divinely sustained goodness of nature contin- ues in the writings of John Scotus Eriugena, a gifted ninth-century Celtic theologian. His book The Voice of the Eagle/The Heart of Celtic Christianity: Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John shows the deep affinity Celtic Christians had for Johannine theology, whose themes of mystical unity echoed the whole Celtic mindset. Eriugena writes of the Word that “was in the beginning with God” and “was God”: “All things that were made through him live immutably in him and are life. In him all things .. . are above time and space and are one. Visible and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, endowed with reason and without reason, all subsist universally in him, heaven and earth, the abyss and whatever is in them, these things live in him and are life . . . take the nature of creatures as an example and learn to see the Creator in those things which were made in and through him. ... ”’* The life of the Word is also the light that enlightens all people. It is indeed the light of all things: “the light of the angels, the light of the created universe, the light of all visible and invisible existence.”'? This theme of light suffusing all creation would be picked up a thousand years later by a nineteenth- century writer with Celtic roots, as we shall later see. Eriugena expresses the Celtic affinity for Eastern Christianity, which sees the whole creation as theophany, a visible manifestation of God. He taught that we can look to creation just as to scriptures to receive the living Word of God. No doubt he knew the story of St. Antony, who was once asked how he could endure life without the consolation of books. Antony’s reply: “My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things and anytime I want to read the words of God, the book is before me.”'+ Eastern Christianity teaches that the essence of God is unknown, hidden in profound mystery for all eternity; but the energies of God—divine opera- tions—are evident throughout the universe. The essence of God is a way of speaking of divine transcendence, whereas the energies speak to us of divine immanence or nearness. The energies of God are free expressions of divine love by which God’s presence is made accessible to us. Fr. Timothy Ware, "t From the preface to Celtic Spirituality, ed. Oliver Davies with Thomas O’Loughlin, in The Classics of Western Spirituality series (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1999), xvii. * Beresford Ellis, Celtic Spirituality, 419. '3 Tbid., 420. Eriugena knew well the Greek fathers and the early Christian mystic, Pseudo-Dionysius. His elevation of John’s mystical vision over Peter’s faith confession carries forward an earlier division between Celtic and Roman Christians, the latter of which stressed the tradition of Peter over that of John. '4 Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (New York: New Directions, 1960), 62. GEL LEIC SPIRITUALITY 285 one of the foremost modern interpreters of Eastern Orthodoxy, comments: “Rather than say [God] created the universe out of nothing, we should say that [God] created it out of his own self, which is love ... God is all that he does, so his act of creating is not something separate from himself. Through our prayer and active service in the world, we discover at every moment [God’s] divine energies, [God’s] immediate presence in each person and each thing. Daily, hourly we touch him.”’* The Orthodox affirm their position as panentheism, literally “All things in God,” rooted in Acts 17:28: “In him we live and move and have our being.” Yet Ware shows that the term also translates “God in all things.” “On the level of spiritual vision,” he says, “we discern everywhere the creative energies of God, upholding all that is, forming the innermost essence of all things.”"® Eriugena, too, believed that God’s divine goodness is the essence and sub- stance of the whole universe. Like Pelagius, he taught that evil is contrary to our essential nature, covering it over, while God’s grace works with nature to release its essential God-given goodness. The theme of goodness and grace lying at the heart of all creation is abundantly clear in the prayer, song, and poetry that formed the core of Celtic daily spirituality. For example, this prayer for guidance and protection invokes the innate goodness of creation: Goodness of sea be thine, Goodness of earth be thine, Goodness of heaven.'7 A similar invocation reveals a sense of God’s grace released in our love of the elements: Grace of the love of the skies be thine, Grace of the love of the stars be thine, Grace of the love of the moon be thine, Grace of the love of the sun be thine.'® A woman from the Isle of Harris, who cured her skin disease by use of seaside plants and fish, prayed thus in praise: There is no plant in the ground But is full of His virtue, *S The Orthodox Way, 56, 29. © Thid., 58. ‘7 Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations Collected in the ee tle and Islands of Scotland in the Last Century (Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1992), 267. ** Ibid., 260. 286 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN There is no form in the strand But is full of His blessing. Jesu! Jesu! Jesu! Jesu! meet it were to praise Him.*? As Philip Newell points out, “These prayers celebrate the presence of God in the elements, but do not confuse God with creation.”*° One of the “sun prayers” illustrates: The eye of the great God, The eye of the God of glory. . . Pouring upon us At each time and season, Pouring upon us, Gently and generously. Glory to thee, Thou glorious sun. Glory to thee, thou sun, Face of the God of life.*’ By itself, the phrase “Glory to thee/Thou glorious sun” sounds like sun worship; but the prayer makes it clear from beginning to end that this great creature is revered as a metaphor of God’s eye, a glorious reflection of the face of the God of life. Celtic prayer conveyed a strong sense of an “I-Thou” relationship between God and all creation and with deep affection for each creature. A herdsgirl or herdsboy might say, “thou beloved among cows” or “thou new moon of the ages” with a feeling of reverence and delight. Because the presence of God was experienced at the heart of creation, finding God did not require looking away from this world but rather seeing more deeply into it. The immediacy of divine presence in the full scope of ordinary life meant that Celtic Christians felt the nearness of God throughout the day. No great divide lay between heaven and earth or between saints above and saints below. A deep sense of unity between the physical and spiritual characterized the prayers and songs accompanying their daily tasks. Although the transcen- dence of God is certainly affirmed and celebrated in these prayers, the immanence of God is the more striking feature—at least to a Protestant like "9 Oliver Davies and Fiona Bowie, ed., Celtic Christian Spirituality: An Anthology of Medieval and Modern Sources (New York: Continuum, 1999), 95. *° Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God, 43. *™ Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, 291-92. CELTIC SPIRITUALITY 287 me, raised in a tradition stressing the transcendence of God. Listen to the b] nearness of divine indwelling expressed in this “encompassing prayer”: God to enfold me / God to surround me, God in my speaking / God in my thinking. God in my sleeping / God in my waking, God in my watching / God in my hoping. God in my life / God in my lips, God in my soul / God in my heart. God in my sufficing / God in my slumber, God in mine ever-living soul / God in mine eternity.** To underscore a divine immanence pervading all creation is, I believe, to point tacitly to the Sacred Feminine in Celtic spirituality. To claim that God’s creatures are a theophany of their Creator is to speak of sacred presence within matter—within mater, “mother” (to play on Latin cognates). The archetypically feminine earth, Mother Earth, is suffused with divine glory; for the Word of God, the Logos who is the very principle of divine life, abides at the heart of all that is made through divine love. Thus, nature can never be viewed as mere “raw material” to be conquered, subdued, dissected, wasted, and abused. Permeated with spirit, matter is a revelation of sacred life clothed in the beauty, order, and creative expression of physical form. Our great poets have perhaps grasped this better than have some theologians. “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God,” proclaims Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In his beloved,poem “God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins maintains that divine splendor charges the whole world and “will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” Even after grieving the destructive effects on nature of human sin and toil, Hopkins marvels: “Yet for all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Could he have meant the love energies of God, continually sustaining and renewing creation? Like these modern English poets, the old Celts held a sacramental view of creation in which creatures are not simply signs pointing to their Creator but, like every true sacrament, participate in the reality to which they point. To speak of God at the heart of matter is to affirm that the sacred resides as much in the archetypically feminine earth as in the archetypically mascu- line heaven. It occurs to me that the immanence of God, as the intimate indwelling of love, better expresses the feminine character of divinity, while the transcendence of God, as the distinctively other divine essence, tends ** Davies and Bowie, Celtic Christian Spirituality, 131. 288 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN better to express our view of the masculine. Not surprisingly, women who write about coming to know the Sacred Feminine describe it as an inner experience and not an external relationship.*3 Of course, God is not divided. The Eternal One is both wholly beyond all gender and completely inclusive of all gender. In God, masculine and fem- inine truths are perfectly balanced, like the Yin-Yang symbol of wholeness. Likewise, immanence and transcendence are bound together in a whole. As James Mackey puts it: “This is a world of eternally immanent, incarnate spirit—spirit that transcends the whole universe of being toward the ultimate and eternal perfection of the universe, precisely because it is immanent in the whole of it.”*+ The earthy Scots Presbyterian mystic George MacLeod would later put it, “What a wonderful world it is, provided you believe in another world. Not over against this world, but interlaced with it.”*> To see the world beyond this yet interlaced with it takes not only faith but also imagination. The Celtic soul is preeminently imaginative, taking flight in art, music, story, myth, and symbol. Here we find a second key expression of the Sacred Feminine within this branch of the church. Celtic Spirituality and the Sacred Imagination For Eastern Orthodox Christians, human beings “made in the image of God” are microcosms of creation. We are capable of seeing the world as a love gift of God’s own Self, a sacrament of divine presence and thus a means of communion with our living Source. Our role as human beings is to praise and bless God in and through the world, reshaping it and giving it fresh meaning. This creative role is a natural consequence of being made in the image of the Creator, and it is one we fulfill not by dominating or exploiting nature but by transfiguring and hallowing it.”° I cannot imagine a better description of Celtic spirituality than transfig- uring and hallowing creation as a way of returning thanks and blessing to God. It took place through a continual and vivid use of sacred imagination in relation to ordinary life. Shaped by early monastic practice, Celtic Christians learned to weave prayers of sacred song and poetry into daily life. According to Esther de Waal, a respected contemporary interpreter of Celtic spiritual- ity, what we find in the oral traditions of prayer collected in Ireland and Scotland in the late nineteenth century is “lay spirituality, a household 3 See Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 141. *4 Beresford Ellis, Celtic Spirituality, xv. *5 Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God, 86. *© See Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, 69. GEER SPIRIT PUAIT TY 289 religion in which praying is inseparable from . . . daily working life.”*? Here, for example, is a prayer for washing the face with three splashes of water, followed by a dressing prayer: The palmful of the God of life, The palmful of the Christ of love, The palmful of the Spirit of Peace, Triune of grace. Even as I clothe my body with wool Cover Thou my soul with the shadow of Thy wing.”” How many of us have a prayer for making up our bed? Here is one that reveals deep acceptance and celebration of the goodness of human sexuality: I make this bed In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, In the name of the night we were conceived, In the name of the night we were born, In the name of the day we were baptized, In the name of each night, each day, Each angel that is in the heavens. *? In the domestic spirituality represented here, prayer is not so much associated with church as with simple daily activity in home and field; not a formal exercise so much as a state of continual, vivid awareness of God’s presence, grace, and protection. It is essentially a contemplative way of life in which the unseen world is perceived and acknowledged within every dimension of the seen. Listen to the faith imagination shining through these stanzas from a churning prayer, in which the lively presence of the saints is woven into a mundane chore: Come thou Brigit, handmaid calm, Hasten the butter on the cream; *7 Esther de Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 1997), xii. 28 Tbid., 77. 79 Thid., 78. 290 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Seest thou impatient Peter yonder Waiting the buttered bannock white and yellow. Come, thou Mary Mother mild, Hasten the butter on the cream; Seest thou Peter and John and Jesus Waiting the gracious butter yonder. 3° The Celtic imagination was also expressed in skilled poetry, song, and storytelling and in remarkably sophisticated art featuring colorful, intricate geometric designs interweaving symbols of the whole creation. Esther de Waal’s description of her encounter with this church tradition is emblematic: “I have been brought into contact with the visual and the non-verbal, confronted by the power of image and of symbol. I have found myself thinking about God as a poet, an artist, drawing us all into his great work of art. I have been taken beyond the rational and intellectual and cerebral, for this world touches the springs of my imagination.”3’ Here again, we see the feminine side of Celtic spiritual expression. De Waal is describing what has recently been identified as “women’s way of knowing”—the intuitive, imag- inative, right-brain functions needed to balance the powerful left-brain dom- inance of Western culture. We know that matters of the spirit cannot be contained in rational argument and that mysteries of faith are often best expressed in poetry, ritual, and music. Is it too much to say that here, in the knitting of creative imagination with scripture and doctrine, we see the feminine face of God reflected in feminine ways of knowing and expressing sacred presence? De Waal quotes Thomas Merton on the central role of imagination in prayer: “Imagination is the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and every- thing around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.”>* Perhaps imagination as a “discovering faculty” is one way to under- stand the writings of George MacDonald, the nineteenth-century Scottish clergyman, poet, and novelist who inspired C. S. Lewis among others. In his delightful and penetrating children’s tale, The Princess and the Goblin, MacDonald offers his readers a feminine image of God. The young heroine of the tale, Princess Irene, discovers high in the castle a room in which sits a woman both indeterminately old and young and incomparably beautiful. The 3° Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, 383. 3™ de Waal, xii—xiv. 3? Tbid., xiv. EE GS SEER OAT Tey 291 woman knows all about Irene and everything else. Within her is the power to heal, guide, and save. She appears only to those whom she chooses, depend- ing on their openness to belief, and she calls herself Irene’s “great-great- grandmother.” This feminine figure of the divine spins a thread of gossamer that gleams like light, appearing wherever the princess has need of it. The motif here is that of divine light threaded throughout the creation to guide us back to God. In his book, Diary of an Old Soul, MacDonald writes: All things are shadows of the shining true: Sun, sea, and air... Everything holds a slender, guiding clue Back to the mighty oneness. *+ Do you hear the echo of Pelagius’s “narrow shafts of light” everywhere penetrating the veil between heaven and earth, or Eriugena’s “light of all visible and invisible existence”? We are back in the Celtic world of creation as sacrament and theophany of divine presence. MacDonald was reared on the old Celtic traditions of the Western Isles. Small wonder he was not well received by the stiffly Scottish Presbyterians of his day! I do wonder, where else in all of Christendom could a writer have come up with God the grandmother but in a historically Celtic land? I suspect that only from a culture rooted in ancient acceptance of a Sacred Feminine reality could a nineteenth-century Christian novelist have conceived of this. So where does all this take us, finally, in relation to the basic nature of our awareness of God and daily practice of prayer? The Gift of the Celtic Spiritual Tradition The Celtic spirit is clearly one that sees life whole—a unity of spirit and matter, earth and heaven, time and eternity, visible and invisible, male and female. The mystical unity of creation and vivid sense of God’s presence at the heart of all life is consistently expressed in the eternal knot and circle motifs of Celtic design. Taking such a perception to heart inevitably shapes our prayer life. Indeed, the theme of interconnected life reminds me of a striking description of intercessory prayer written by Ann and Barry Ulanov: “Intercessory prayer pulls us into the tow of God’s connectedness to everything ... into a current that shows us nothing is separated from anything else, no one from everyone else. We are in an ocean that flows under everything and through everyone. ... We live 33 George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1905), 96. 292 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN the meaning of the mystical body of Christ in this interconnectedness of inter- cession, where our pleas for others become pleas for ourselves and their pleas for themselves become pleas for us. We know by direct experience that we are, as St. Paul says, members one of another.”3+ This emphasis on the unity of our lives in God and the loss of sharply defined individual boundaries expresses an archetypal feminine characteristic: the web of relatedness in which connection forms the matrix of reality. The archetypal masculine counterbalance emphasizes separa- tion, distinction, and individuality. In the Celtic way of prayer, “we conscious- ness” runs deeper than “I consciousness,” keeping us grounded in community with each other, God, and creation. The Celtic accent on divine presence and goodness within all of life gives a deeply incarnational quality to Celtic prayer. It is not afraid of the body or its senses: Bless to me, O God, each thing mine eye sees; Bless to me, O God, each sound mine ear hears; Bless to me, O God, each odour that goes to my nostrils; Bless to me, O God, each taste that goes to my lips. .. 34 Every dimension of human life belongs in prayer: Bless to me, O God, my soul and my body; Bless to me, O God, my belief and my condition; Bless to me, O God, my heart and my speech; Bless to me, O God, the handling of my hand; Strength and busyness of morning, Habit and temper of modesty, Force and wisdom of thought, And Thine own path, O God of virtues, Till I go to sleep at night. .. .*° Within this tradition of prayer I find a broad and poetic language for the divine, frequently, to be sure, in traditional masculine terms, but at times expanding into all manner of original expression and cosmic imagery: “O Thou helping Being,” “O gentle friend,” “O only life of all created things,” “O Marrow of true wisdom,” “O Voice of the people,” “O heart-pitier and assister of all misery,” “O fertile, undulating, fiery sea,” “O home of the planets,” “O holy story-teller, holy scholar,” “O overflowing, loving, silent one,” “O generous and thunderous giver of gifts.” How rich and spontaneous 34 Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, 199. 35 Tbid., 197. CELILG SPIRTTUALITY 293 is this language of prayer, stretching us beyond the norms of liturgy or private devotion. In sum, I suppose what the Celtic spirit has done for me is slowly rearrange the furniture of language and conceptuality in my prayer life. The reality of feminine and masculine dimensions within divinity as well as humanity seems both more alive and natural to me. I sense permission to expand from a partial expression of faith to a greater degree of wholeness. So let me conclude with these words from a Celtic prayer of praise, inviting you to enter it in a spirit of prayer: I am giving Thee worship with my whole life, I am giving Thee assent with my whole power, I am giving Thee honor with my whole utterance, I am giving Thee reverence with my whole understanding, I am giving Thee offering with my whole thought, I am giving Thee praise with my whole fervor, I am giving Thee love with my whole devotion, I am giving Thee kneeling with my whole desire, I am giving Thee affection with my whole sense, I am giving Thee existence with my whole mind, I am giving Thee my soul, O God of all gods.3° 3° de Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer, 203-204. Girl Talk Dr. Kristin Saldine, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Minister of the Chapel, preached by KRISTIN SALDINE this sermon in Miller Chapel on Fune 21, d 2005, as part of the Institute of Theology. Exodus 1:8—22 I OHN BELL, a former leader of the Iona Community in Scotland, told a memorable story in a lecture he gave at Princeton Seminary in 2003. Bell told about his experience leading an evensong service at West- minster Abbey, a very impressive and imposing opportunity and quite an honor. So Bell went about reviewing the Anglican lectionary texts assigned for the day. He looked at the Old Testament reading for matins, the morning service. It was Exodus 1, from the first verse to about halfway through the chapter on the cry of the Israelites to God to be released from bondage. Then he looked at the Old Testament reading for the evening service. It was Exodus 2, beginning about halfway through that chapter. The reading was on the call of Moses. But between the cry of the Israelites and the call of Moses the lectionary had excluded a significant chunk of scripture. Intrigued about what verses were missing, Bell went to the Bible, looked them up, and there found wonderful verses that tell the stories of five remarkable women: the Hebrew midwives (Shiphrah and Puah), a Levite woman who was the mother of Moses, Moses’ sister, and Pharaoh’s daughter. That night, John Bell began the service by announcing to the congregation that, between matins that morning and evensong that night, five Middle Eastern women had gone missing from Westminster Abbey. This got him to thinking about how many hymns and spiritual songs he knew about the great male saints of the Bible—Moses, Elijah, Peter, and Paul—and how few hymns and songs there were about biblical women (except for Mary). So he wrote a song about women in the Bible who are heroes of faith but who are often left out of the lectionary and the hymnbook.’ Bell’s story got me to thinking, less about singing and more about speak- ing. Each of the Hebrew women in Exodus 1 and 2—the midwives, the mother, and the sister—speak and act on behalf of God’s providence. But who told them they could? Take Shiphrah and Puah. Who told those two Hebrew midwives they could stand before Pharaoh and speak? Think about it. Here is Pharaoh—powerful, male, elite, divinelike—building warehouses * John Bell, “There is a Line of Women,” in One Is the Body: Songs of Unity and Diversity (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2002). EIU IE IOZUINS 295 and monumental architecture for his consuming culture. And he’s building it off the sweat of the Hebrews—a people Walter Brueggemann describes as “that floating mass of unacknowledged, unnamed humanity who are socio- economic nobodies.”* So, who says those midwives can speak? This is an important question. And we need an answer, because in just a few chapters Moses is going to be asked the very same question. “Go speak,” says God. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” says Moses. “Go speak,” says God. “But even if I go speak before the people of Israel and say, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ they’re going to ask me, ‘Yeah? Well, if you know God so well, tell us his name!” “Go speak,” says God. “But I don’t have any proof that you really did tell me to speak! I need some proof!” “Go speak,” says God. “But ’'m not eloquent,” says Moses. “Go speak,” says God. “Send someone else,” says Moses. And then God gets irritated. “Moses, take everything I just gave you—the speeches, the special rod, even your brother Aaron—and go speak . . . now!” Meanwhile, back at the Pharaonic ranch, Shiphrah and Puah are standing before an earthly lord and overseer—standing without benefit of a theophany, a prepared speech, or a magic shamanic staff. And what are they doing? Speaking! Now, don’t get me wrong. Moses is my hero. His calling by God to confront Pharaoh, lead his people out of Egypt, and spend forty years in the wilderness liberating them and sweating the oppression out of them so that they could inherit the promised land as a free, promised people—well, there’s no other like him in the Old Testament, and Moses needed all the divine counsel and intervention he could get. But while I admire Moses, I do not aspire to be Moses. I aspire to be like Shiphrah and Puah— effective practitioners of a vocation, trained in the practical arts of ministry. I’m interested in what happens when they are summoned before the powers that be, because it seems like I’m always being called before the powers that be—without a theophany, a speech, that special shamanic rod, or a brother! “Why do you let the male children live?” Pharaoh asks. “Sorry,” * Walter Brueggemann et al, New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 1, Exodus (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 695. 296 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Shiphrah and Puah say, “We just can’t get there fast enough. You know those Hebrews—they’re like rabbits—they’re having kids all over the place!” Good answer! No, it doesn’t have the thundering weight of the words God gave to Moses: “Say this to the people of Israel: The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob has appeared to me saying ... 1 promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt.” No, it doesn’t have the majestic, redacted mantel of tradition, testimony, and au- thority—but Shiphrah and Puah’s answer is quick, funny, and shows street smarts. It’s also very subversive. Pharaoh fears the Hebrews because they are too many and they are multiplying. Shiphrah and Puah take Pharaoh’s worst fear, roll it up, and punch him right in the gut—all the while smiling and shrugging, “Gee whiz, sorry, but what do you expect?” So, I ask again: who told them they could speak? No one, really. All we are told is that Shiphrah and Puah feared God, so they did not do as the King of Egypt commanded them. They let the male children live. Shiphrah and Puah speak because they believe God spoke first. They believed in a living God, a God who, in Nicholas Wolterstorffs words, “spoke to them on their way.”? And God spoke with a clarity that demanded faithful response. God spoke with the language of decision.* Il This decision is no small thing. Pharaoh is planning genocide. Boys will be killed. Girls will be spared only to be given as wives and concubines to other men. An entire culture will be eradicated. Systemic evil is sinister in its simplicity. When nation fights nation, when culture dominates culture, when interest consumes interest, it usually goes something like this: kill the men, confiscate the women. Men are manpower. Women are man-bearers. Both must be controlled. Egypt did it. So did early Israel. So did the Romans. You can read about the pattern in Orlando Patterson’s book Slavery and Social Death.’ Kill men (or work them to death). Confiscate women (or use them up and toss them away). That’s why, in our time, boys in places like Sierra Leone are rounded up by paramilitary groups, injected with cocaine, and set loose in their drug-induced rage. That’s why young girls in Pakistan are raped and left in 3 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ix. 4 Thid., 5. 5 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1982). GIRS Te AUG 297 their shame. Dehumanization, whether sensational or subtle, still wreaks havoc in the world. Kill men. Abuse women. It’s still happening. Yet, despite all odds, the Shiphrahs and Puahs of the world still stand to speak. They see their vocations, their practical everyday lives, as being godly speech. Here’s what I mean. According to Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, the single most important deter- mining factor with regard to the global standard of living (which is withering under the crushing load of global poverty), to improving agricultural and environmental practices, to increasing the Gross National Product, to im- proving health care, to promoting involvement and gender balance in deci- sion-making at all levels of society—is the education of a fifth-grade girl.° In today’s economy, it’s not who can speak that separates the haves from the have-nots. It’s who can read. Worldwide, one billion adults are illiterate— two-thirds of them are women. Tonight there are over 125 million elemen- tary-school-aged children in the world who should be in class but are denied education. Two-thirds of them are girls. I thought about that recently when I was reminded that it has been six months since the cataclysmic Christmas tsunami struck in the Indian Ocean in Decem- ber. And I remembered in those first few weeks after the horror, of all the relief efforts that were made in the aftermath—and there were many—there was one I found particularly poignant. Just days after the disaster, relief workers were passing out small parcels they called “classroom in a box.” The parcels enabled any teacher, adult, or relative to organize a makeshift “classroom without walls.” They were encouraged to gather children together and have school. Relief workers have found that children heal faster from trauma if they are given the structure of a normal daily routine where they can be together under adult supervision. And school is the perfect place. I give thanks for every box that was assembled, every box given, and every person who stepped forward to teach. Why focus on educating girls? Educating girls breaks the cycle of poverty and powerlessness in surprising ways. The economic reality in most of the world forces young men to leave their homes in search of work or out of fear of being conscripted. It’s the young women who remain behind. According to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, “In societies, women are systematically marginalized; and yet, when catastrophe strikes—whether it is in the form of illness, conflict, or hardship—women bear the biggest ° Statement of Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, at the Economic and Social Council Substantive Session, High-Level Segment: “The Role of Employment and Work in Poverty Eradication: The Empowerment and Advancement of Women,” Geneva, July 6, 1999. 298 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN burden. Take the HIV/AIDS crisis in the world. Girls are most likely to care for a sick family member and help manage the household.7 Think of the burden that young girls in this world carry in the wake of the so-called “silent tsunami” that claims 150,000 lives every eleven days from AIDS and malaria alone.” And just think of what might happen if young girls could read the instructions on a packet of antibiotics, or contraceptives, or seeds? The Shiphrahs and Puahs of this world might begin to speak. Ill One commentary on Exodus mentions that the name “Puah” has no obvious etymology in Hebrew but is usually taken to mean “splendor.”® However, a footnote admits that “Puah” may also be related to the Ugaritic word for “girl.” So, who do you think spoke to Pharaoh? Little Miss Splendor? Or just some girl? I think it was just some girl who did the talking. It was girl talk. Who knew girl talk would become God talk? Who knew girl talk would become Gospel talk? Who knew women would be “commissioned by Jesus Christ to speak on behalf of God .. . [as] witnesses?” May we, like Shiphrah and Puah, fear a living God, a God who speaks, has spoken, and who continues to speak to us on the way—a God who speaks with the language of decision. In the small, yet significant and sometimes even miraculous workings of our daily lives, may we be bold enough to answer. For we have already been commissioned to speak. 7 Kofi Annan, “Annan Underscores Education for All Girls,” Daily News, March 9, 2002. ® The reference to the “silent tsunami” comes from a recent United Nations report on global development. There, one of the principal authors, Jeffery Sachs (a controversial economist from the Earth Institute at Columbia University), points out that the silent tsunami of malaria kills as many people every month as died in the recent tragedy in Asia. The term “silent tsunami” has caught on and is being used to describe several epidemic diseases, including AIDS, tuberculosis, and polio. The statistic I referred to, of a silent tsunami that claims 150,000 lives every eleven days from AIDS and malaria, came from the Center for Global Development, http://www.cgdev.org/ (accessed October 31, 2005). Additional information was obtained from NPR Fresh Air interview with activist Greg Mortenson, February 7, 2002, www.npr.org/freshair. Mortenson is Executive Director of the Central Asia Institute, which has, since 1993, “opened schools and provided education for over 4000 girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The schools promote literacy, women’s vocational skills, public health and environmental awareness.” See www.centralasiainstitute. org (accessed October 31, 2005). James Philip Hyatt, Exodus: New Century Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 61. 9 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, 7. Wh Dr. C. Clifton Black is Otto A. Piper ere Do You Want Professor of Biblical Theology at Princeton ka Fat? Theological Seminary. He preached this sermon at Miller Chapel (Princeton Theo- by C. CLIFTON BLACK logical Seminary) for the 62nd Annual Mark 6:6b—44 Institute of Theology, on fume 24, 2005. DON’T RECALL ever preaching on a text as long as this. Who knows how long this sermon may run? Some of you are already consulting your watches. You can leave whenever the Spirit moves you, with no hard feelings. I may be here, still rattling on, when Part II of the Institute starts next week. Until tonight, I don’t recall ever hearing a sermon preached on the death of John the Baptist. I know I haven’t preached on it before. Earlier this week, I asked my pulpit predecessor, Kristin Saldine, about you and what sort of thing you might be expecting. She told me that most of you are pastors, that this sermon would send you off from this week at Princeton, back to your churches, if you hadn’t already left. Naturally, for an inspirational word, I gravitated to the only text in the New Testament that narrates a beheading. There are two reasons I selected such a large chunk of scripture on which to preach. First, I have a high doctrine of scripture, and I do believe—as did Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and many others before me—that scrip- ture preaches just by being read and that sermons are, at best, footnotes to the Word, which proclaims itself without our help. As a preacher, I find this to be a great comfort. You also should take comfort in it. More Bible, less Black is invariably a reliable yardstick. A second reason for opting for so long a text is my conviction that Mark really intended the stories of Jesus’ sending of the twelve, the execution of John, and the feeding of five thousand to be held together and remembered alongside one another, cheek by jowl by cheek. Why did Mark tell his story of Jesus this way? Perhaps he wanted us to consider two very different approaches to ministry and decide which one befits servants of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. First, Jesus sends out the twelve to engage in a ministry very much like the one he himself performed: casting out unclean spirits and healing some who were sick. The thing about this commission that impresses me is its simplic- ity. The resources he tells them to take are so minimal as to be nearly incredible: a staff, the sandals they are wearing, overalls, and underwear. They are to take no bread, no beggar’s bag, no money in their fanny packs. Travel light. Don’t stay too long in one place. Preach, and if they don’t get it, move on. Simple. 300 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN When they return, sixteen verses later, the twelve are quick to report all they’ve accomplished. But that’s not really the point. We know that’s not the point, because Jesus now commissions them to feed his hungry sheep, all five thousand of them, with five loaves. I forgot the fish: two sardines. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus said. The disciples don’t get it. Most days neither do I. Like the disciples in Mark, I tend to think ministry is about me. Even after all these years, that’s the trap I still spring on myself. It’s about my ability to pull it off—whatever it is. The feeding of the multitude by Jesus’ disciples should forever have laid that bird to rest. The disciples don’t do a thing but deliver to others what Jesus has already blessed and broken and given to God. All are fed and satisfied. They even have leftovers, all because the little they have is offered to God and blessed by Jesus. He is the chef; we’re not. We’re the Domino’s pizza couriers—no more, but certainly no less. Sometimes, when a class is helping me puzzle my way through the parables in Mark 4, I'll ask them if they or anyone they know has ever had an experience like that of the sower in that chapter. You know: a sower went out to sow. Seed falls beside the path. Nothing. Seed falls into the rocks. Zilch. Seed falls among the thorns. Zip. Seed falls into rich soil and—look out! There’s a 30-, 60-, 100-percent yield, way off the charts. Have you ever been interviewed for a pastorate and had someone ask you, “How would you evaluate yourself as a preacher?” You answer, “Well, three Sundays out of four, my sermons fizzle out and go nowhere, from the pulpit straight to the floor. The thing never gains altitude, just drops like a dead duck. But every now and then—one Sunday out of four, I’d say—I make the very same pitch, no changes, and that sermon takes off like a rocket, pulling me and everyone else along with it.” You and the search committee stand up, everybody shakes hands, and they say to you—what? Maybe they say to you, “Feed us, please. We’re hungry. We are starving for some Gospel. The real thing, not the fake stuff. Not The Da Vinci Purpose-Driven Prayer of Jabez. We've tried Gospel Lite and it tastes thin and we’re still famished for the kingdom of God. Can you feed us some of that? Please?” Asa teacher of mine once said, these are scenes of heartrending famine that never make the cover of Time Magazine. If we do not serve them Gospel, who will? When you come down to it, that’s finally the only reason any of us have for being in ministry. Doctors may keep us alive a little longer than some of our grandparents, but they can’t tell us why we should go on living. Captains of industry can show us how their bottom lines stand at 25 percent over last year this time, and 55 percent higher than five years ago. Will they account WHERE DO YOU WANT TO EAT? 301 for how that profit will be used—or just what it took to make it? Politicians? Please ... I am still naive enough to hope that, maybe, somewhere in Washington, there still is a Gary Cooper or a Jimmy Stewart who is decent, really cares about the American people, and will do the right thing even if it costs him reelection. Most days, however, I know that such figures have gone the way of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. This week I read in The Washington Post a comment by one of the Capitol’s thousands of lavishly paid lobbyists, an offhand remark whose cold candor arrested my eye. This fellow said, “There are only two engines that drive Washington: one is greed, and the other is fear.” In particular cases, that may be wrong. Overall, however, I suspect that’s right. It surely matches what I read in the papers and hear on the news. Greed and fear: as old as politics itself, older even than Machiavelli, although he put into words what everyone had always known. Greed and fear: the unseen, most frequent visitors to Herod’s dinner table. There they all are, at the Antipas birthday party: the cabinet, the joint chiefs-of-staff, Galilee’s highest and mightiest. After one drink too many, Herod, that lecherous fool, blurts out to his stepdaughter, who happens to be one sexy entertainer, “Whatever you want is yours, even half my kingdom. Come here, honey; name your price.” His wife Herodias finessed that offer and her daughter into eliminating the person she most despised: her harshest critic, John the Baptist. Greed and fear: together again. Mark tells us that when Herod sprang the trap he had laid for himself, he was truly sorry. Although he was arrested for political protest, the Baptist was placed in protective custody. Herod respected John as a man of integrity. But if you're the head of state, you can’t be proved a liar in your own home, at a state dinner, before a roomful of politicians and generals who are lusting for your power and who must be controlled. At the head table, greed and fear sit on either side of Herod, whispering reminders in his ears. Perhaps, when John the Baptist was escorted from his cell, he heard Herod’s voice whispering in his ear, “John, even though we haven’t always seen eye to eye, you know how much I admire you. I think you're the last honest man in Galilee.” Continuing down the hallway, Dead Man Walking hears Live King Whispering, “John, you understand the way the world works. I’ve gone too far; I can’t back down now. I made it a promise—I’ll grant you, one I should never have made—but a promise I have to keep.” Into the executioner’s room John is led, as Herod’s voice keeps whispering, “Tf I lose face, I lose control. If I lose control, all hell breaks loose. You know I can’t have that. We can’t have that.” 302 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Up the steps, to the platform, where the officer holding the great axe stands silent beside a stained chopping block with the basket receptacle. As John kneels, still the voice drones in his ear, “Though I could never say this publicly, John, you know how much I love you. I mean really love you. You’ve got guts, John. How I admire your guts. You know, you’re the only person I’ve ever known—WHACK! This is how prophets die—not in a blaze of heroic glory but in lonely places haunted by hatred and shame. And the jailers holding keys to the death chamber are greed and fear. This is true of Galilee and of Washington. Sad to say, it is also true of City Hall, the corporate boardroom, and even, at its weakest and worst, the church. John’s disciples at least gave their teacher’s body a decent burial. By the time fear had worked over his closest followers, Jesus’ body wasn’t accorded even that final respect. Picture two scenes, two suppers, side by side. First envision Herod’s: national power, festooned in wealth, draped with betrayal and guilt, fueled by greed and fear. Every instrument is at Herod’s disposal, save savvy enough to elude manipulation and a means to check his overweening pride. He opens his big mouth, utters words that can’t be retracted, and an innocent man’s head is severed from his shoulders. Next picture the banquet over which Jesus presides: a desert in the middle of nowhere, populated by thousands of nobodies, attended by twelve fairly dumb waiters. There’s nothing at Jesus’ disposal, except compassion for the multitudes, who are like shepherdless sheep, and faith in God, to whom Jesus offers what little his disciples have. He opens his mouth, teaches and pro- nounces blessing, and five thousand leave more than satisfied, abundantly refreshed. Which banquet is real? Both of them. Never have God’s people gone without nourishment, as early as Moses in Sinai, as late as yesterday in Princeton. And never have we been without Herods, scheming and schemed against, beheading their threats. Which banquet will prevail? Only one: that sponsored by God, presided by his Messiah, Jesus. With the resurrection of that Christ, crucified by another of Herod’s agents, God saw to that. We see it with the eyes of faith. With common vision we see that before long, Herod was toppled. Finally, all the Herods are toppled, Herods then and Herods now. At which banquet will you take your seat? That’s the question before you and me and everyone with whom we preach and teach. We cannot make up their minds for them. Only for ourselves can we decide, offer the choice to others, then leave the rest to God, who still owns the vineyard and still calls to life what is sown while we sleep and rise, night and day, faith sprouting and WHERE DO YOU WANT TO EAT? 303 growing we know not how. This much I know: I may be a sheep—which, as most of you know, are conspicuously stupid and unteachable animals—but I’m one sheep who knows the sound of his shepherd’s voice. That voice is unmistakable and sounds nothing like Herod and his pals greed and fear. Greed and fear: that’s all I hear on the news, and this lamb is sickened to death by their voice, sick of being jerked around by greed and fear. I have a hunch that most of you and most of the people in your churches are also sick of it. It’s past time for the church in America’s heartland and across the world to wake up and hear the Shepherd’s voice, which sings with Isaiah (12:2), not about fear, but about faith: Surely it is God who will save me; I will trust in God and not be afraid. For the LorD is my refuge and my sure defense, The Lorp will be my Savior. You're a pastor. You give them something to eat. And God will bless your offering. God will multiply it beyond your knowledge and calculation. And your people will be fed, with leftovers. And, rest assured, the Host of the Banquet will be one greater than you. Fed by Ravens fon M. Walton is pastor of the First Pres- byterian Church in New York City. He by JON M. WALTON preached this sermon in Miller Chapel on ; june 28, 2005, at the third Engle Insti- I Kings 17:1-7 tute of Preaching. II Corinthians 9:6-15 S OMETIMES THE PREACHER has to read the text with a crime scene inves- tigator’s eye. You’re on the lookout for something left behind, or some- thing embedded in the passage that looks a little different, something that catches your attention. You conduct the exegete’s equivalent of a “blue-light inspection” and spray the evidence with a solution of one part Luminol, one part word study, a smattering of form criticism, and every tool and swab in your library. Take the rope, for instance, that is left hanging over the side of Jericho’s wall from Rahab’s apartment, the one she used to lower the two Israelite spies, the ones who made their getaway and took word back to Joshua. One of the kids in our church school drew that rope one time when asked to draw a picture of a Biblical story. Most kids drew a cross, Noah’s ark and the animals, Jonah in the belly of the whale, but this kid went for Jericho’s wall, the gates closed, night falling, and a single rope hanging over the side from the top-floor window. Now there’s a biblical scholar in the making! Or what about that strange scene toward the end of Mark’s Gospel and the arrest of Jesus in the garden? It happens right after the guards laid hold of Jesus. Mark moves the action into fast forward. First one of the disciples takes a sword and cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, and Jesus tells everyone to put away their swords. Then as fast as a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, Mark remembers that there was someone there who was wearing nothing but a linen loincloth. In the heat of the action when the temple guards grabbed for him they caught him only by his ephod, which came off in their hands. The man ran away naked and the soldier was left with a cloth in his paw. Anybody here know what that was all about? Every now and then there is a loose thread in the Bible, a detail that is noted but not explained. Many a doctoral candidate has found rich material for exploring the consequential and the inconsequential among them. One such detail is found in that story of Elijah on the lam, running from Ahab, King of Israel, in the seventeenth chapter of I Kings. The characters in this story are almost archetypal, of such caricature that they appear like soap opera heroes and villains. FED BY RAVENS 305 The weak-kneed Ahab is beguiled by the charms of a foreign woman, an ambitious and ruthless jezebel by the name of Jezebel, that saucy queen who worshiped the Canaanite god Baal, and who built an altar and a temple for him in Samaria, provoking the anger of Yahweh. Baal was the god of storm and rain, a necessary element for fertility. Canaanite religion held that in drought, Baal is defeated by death. When there is rain, Baal is alive, turning the tables on death. So you can understand why the God of Life itself, Yahweh, had little patience with such nonsense as Baal worship! Onto the scene of history walks Elijah the Tishbite, appearing from nowhere. He is a prophet on a mission from a place forgotten, Tishbe. Tishbe is a town on no one’s map, a place that no one knows. Elijah takes on Ahab eyeball to eyeball in retribution for the temple to Baal that Ahab has built and declares, “As the Lord, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except by my word.” Elijah had barely gotten the words out when the Lord told Elijah to take a powder and get out of town as quickly as possible. “Go from here and turn eastward and hide yourself at the Wadi Cherith, east of the Jordan.” God continued, “You shall drink from the Wadi, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” I have commanded the ravens to feed you there. Something is wrong with this picture. It is with that promise, and those words, that a thread appears. It bears examination, a squirt of Luminol and a squint with the magnifying glass. I mean, for the life of me, I cannot imagine why God would appoint ravens to provide food for Elijah. Just think of it: from the raven’s beak to the prophet’s mouth! Yikes. It sounds like something you’d see on Fear Factor, “How many ravens and worms can you eat?” If I were God, I think I would have waited to spring this unpleasant surprise on Elijah only after he got to the Wadi and not before he had started on his way, lest he dissuade the old prophet from going at all. Short of that, if I had been the recorder of I Kings, I might have simply excised from the story the detail about the ravens, for the sake of decency or at least decorum. I mean, who wants to get fed by these birds? Ravens, after all, were the buzzards of the Middle East, the carrion scavengers of Elijah’s world. The scriptures have no truck with these crea- tures, which is why it seems so strange that they are given this duty of distinction and why it may be worth our effort to figure out what they are doing in the story. Ravens get bad press in the Bible. In Genesis, Noah sends a raven to search for dry land, but out of greed, the raven neglects to return, leaving Noah in the lurch. Psalm 147 and Job 38 suggest that ravens leave their young crying 306 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN for food and shirk the duties of parenting. In Leviticus 11:15, ravens head the list of “detestable birds” and God’s people are forbidden to eat them. “They are an abomination,” the scriptures tell us. In Proverbs 30:17 the raven is depicted as a sadistic creature, gouging out the eyes of its victims. Why do you suppose God fed Elijah with such a foul creature? Elijah, after all, is God’s chosen man on the scene, the one prophet who stands up to Ahab and calls a spade a spade. The scholars compare him to Moses in stature, and the writer of I Kings connects the dots through the desert, from the tents of Moses to the hiding place of Elijah. How odd it is, then, that Elijah would be fed by such an abominable bird, except . . . except that in Luke 12:24, the ravens get a remarkably favorable presentation. In the sermon on the Mount Jesus says, “Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap; they have neither storehouse nor barn; yet God feeds them.” In the mind of Jesus they are examples of faithfulness and beneficiaries of God’s grace. William Hutto, a student at Duke Divinity School, in a fine sermon on this text says, “The raven, abominable, unclean animal that it is, is elevated to [the] service of the Lord. ... The[se ravens] ... are [Jesus’] model for faith in the providence of God.”’ You get the point, don’t you? It is the unholy ravens that are appointed to a holy vocation! Therein lies a tale. There isn’t a single person here who has not at some time wondered about the call that is ours, the vocation to which we are ordained—with all of our flaws and imperfections, our inadequacies and failings. We have all at times come to the conclusion that either God has a great sense of humor or if the ministry is really in the hands of none better than us, the church is of all people most to be pitied. I look around the presbytery and wonder at my colleagues, some of them greatly gifted and obviously so, and others deeply flawed and clearly unfit for such a high calling. These are people in whom God sees more than is apparent to my untrained eye. But then, I have never had an eye for such things. I am too critical, not as forgiving as God. I remember in seminary my polity professor saying to us that the presby- tery would be our church. Our best friends would be our fellow presbyters and colleagues, and we would be like brothers and sisters to one another. Apparently my professor had not been to New York City Presbytery, which most of the time behaves like Pentecost before the Spirit came! " Mr. Hutto’s sermon “Elijah’s Feast” and his exegetical paper on the I Kings text, submitted for consideration in the David H. C. Read Sermon competition of 2005, drew my attention to God’s appointment of these unenviable ravens and to the enviable task of sustaining the prophet. My sermon, while inspired by that insight, is, however, my own work. FED BY RAVENS 307 I think about myself and what an imperfect vessel I am, the person who goes home at night weary from the church and gets up in the morning and looks back at me in the mirror as I stand there shaving, the one whose fuse is short and whose weariness with the church gets out of control sometimes, this fellow I barely know, whom everyone describes as long-suffering and calm on every occasion. Is that really the fellow in the mirror? This is the same person who counsels people that they are working too hard and that they need to spend more time with their family but who is himself at meetings most weeknights until ten. This is the same person who prays with folks at the hospital and in worship and in counseling but whose own prayer life and devotional time is sorely lacking. Maybe, like me, you, too, have wondered what redeeming social value God saw in you. What is it in us, ravens that we are, that is worth putting to work for the sake of the commonwealth of God? We have good company in this self-doubt and awareness of our own imperfections. Remember Isaiah’s reaction when he entered the temple and saw God, God so great that just the hem of his robe filled the temple. There in the temple, Isaiah was struck with an enormous sense of inadequacy. “Woe is me,” he said, “for I am one of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.” Yet, keenly aware of his own imperfection, Isaiah responds to God’s need of a messenger by saying, “Here am I, send me.” St. Paul, arguably the most eloquent theologian the church has ever produced, reminds us again and again of the inner struggles of his life, which haunted him and emerged in his descriptions of his interior life, for example, “cast down,” “in despair,” “afflicted,” “thorn in the flesh.” For Paul, life in Christ’s service was a life of struggle against his own imperfection. Any distinguished preacher who has done any good for the human soul has borne the humanity of his or her shortcomings in one way or another. Some years ago I heard Dr. Gardner Taylor describe Martin Luther King Jr. According to Taylor, there was a certain shadow about King, a brooding pensiveness that never seemed to lift from his spirit, an inner tension that was expressed in the solemn cadences of his pulpit oratory. Now, of course, we know that King had his human side, a straying from his marriage vows that haunts our memory of him. Edmund Steimle, my homiletics teacher at Union, was perhaps the most effective Protestant preacher in the latter part of the twentieth century. He was a man given to a tough outer presence, gruff and impersonal at times, barking at students. I once heard him ask a quivering first-year student to explain before the class what it was that he wanted to say in his long, rambling, incomprehensible, sermon. The student gave a one-sentence an- 308 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN swer. Steimle responded, “Then why the hell didn’t you say that?” But Steimle’s gruff exterior was a cover for his enormous sense of inadequacy. When he first arrived at Union Seminary, his office was located on the third floor, sandwiched between Reinhold Niebuhr on one side and Paul Tillich on the other. He anguished day after day, located between the walls of these two theological giants, intimidated by the fact that he did not have an earned doctorate. It was the darkest period of his professional life, he said, and he spent the first year of his time on the faculty at Union struggling with a deep depression. Barbara Brown Taylor describes her own struggles in her book The Preaching Life. “There are voices that come to us from inside ourselves,” she says, “reminding us what we will never be, never do, never have. No one has ever explained to my satisfaction where this relentlessly critical chorus comes from, but it never seems to tire of telling me how clumsy, lazy, weak, spoiled, thick-headed, ridiculous, and doomed to failure I am.”* These words are from a person whom every reflective American preacher of our generation, women and men alike, wants to emulate. It is, I suppose, the Achilles heel of the preacher that we are so aware of our weakness, our ravenlike nature, the inadequacy of the messenger, when compared with the magnificence of the message that we are meant to bear. It is, I think, the means by which God keeps us honest if we will pay attention, especially if we pay attention. We celebrate the Lord’s Supper rather frequently at Old First. I wash my hands on those days before I go into the sanctuary. It seems the right thing to do before handling the bread and the cup. But the truth is there is nothing I can do to wash my hands in a way that matters to the truth that the Gospel wants to bear. God has done what we could not, in giving us a savior to provide for us all that we need and even more: bread for the journey and refreshment for the soul. There by the Wadi, Elijah is sent to be fed by the ravens and strengthened for the journey that lies ahead of him. These ravens seem such unlikely birds to be sent on such an important mission, but they are what God has, so they are pressed into God’s service to do more than that of which they are capable, for the sake of one whom they do not fully comprehend. Such is our story, as well. God uses what we inadequate ravens have, that in us which is not perfect, for the sake of a greater task, which is to do more than that of which we are capable, for the sake of one whom we do not fully comprehend. > Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1993), 54. FED BY RAVENS 309 The point is not that we be lovable, or perfect, or that we feel able, or even that we fully understand what it is that we do, but that God’s people be fed with the food that God will provide. Look what God did, after all, with Moses’ stuttering, Jacob’s dishonesty, Paul’s thorn in the flesh, Peter’s deni- als, Nicodemus’ questions, Mary’s tears at the tomb. In weakness we are made strong. There is a telling moment when Jesus preaches in his hometown of Nazareth, a place where his sermon did not bear much fruit. He quotes a proverb common among his people. “Doubtless you will say to me, ‘Physi- cian, heal thyself.’ That which you did in Capernaum, do also here in Nazareth.” But, of course, if you know the story of the ravens, you know that the point is not that the physician must first heal herself but that she heal whomever she can. Ravens, take wing. This is not about you. This is about God. Feed, nurture, sustain, and heal whom you can. You be the raven. God will provide the food. Rememberin C. Clifton Black, Otto A. Piper Professor 8 of Biblical Theology, currently chairs Otto Piper* Princeton Theological Seminary’s Depart- ment of Biblical Studies. He is coauthor, by C. CLIFTON BLACK with Robert A. Spivey and D. Moody Smith, of the forthcoming sixth edition of Anatomy of the New Testament (Pren- tice—Hall). A CLAIM TO REMEMBER my professorial chair’s namesake will seem risible, perhaps the height of presumption, to many of this journal’s readers. As I have confessed elsewhere, in the year that Otto Piper retired from the Princeton Seminary faculty, I was matriculating for the second grade in Thomasville, North Carolina." With respect to Piper, presumption is the last sin I would wittingly commit. Remember I must, however, as must we all. In institutions of higher learning, “the creation of new knowledge” has become commonplace in characterizing their raison d’tre. In that there is truth. It is not, however, the whole truth. In the academy, as in the church, a pervasive amnesia must be combated, for which a vital memory is indispensable. It is quite impossible for the people of God to know where they are going, and why, if they cannot recall where they have been, both in carriage and miscarriage. Remembering—deliberately reconstituting the members of Christ’s body, both the living and the dead—is a sacred obligation, incum- bent on all who enjoy the privilege of refreshment at Princeton during their wilderness wanderings. For those who knew him, even more for those who could never have had that privilege, let us now praise Otto Alfred Wilhelm Piper (1891—1982).* ‘THE PERSONAL PIPER Otto Piper (pronounced “peeper”) was born November 29, 1891, in Lichte, Germany, to a middle-class family. His maternal grandfather was a staunch, confessional Lutheran; some of his ancestors were French Hugue- nots who fled across the Rhine after repeal of the Edict of Nantes. His * Taken from “The Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters,” edited by Donald K. McKim. To be published by InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. Copyright InterVarsity Press and used by permission. All rights reserved. "C. Clifton Black, “Exegesis as Prayer,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 23 (2002): 131-45. > Earlier drafts of this article were read with critical care by Dean of Academic Affairs Emeritus James F. Armstrong, President Emeritus Thomas W. Gillespie, the Reverend Dr. James A. Glasscock, and Professor Daniel L. Migliore. Their assistance was invaluable. I am also indebted to Messrs. Robert Benedetto, William O. Harris (emeritus), and Kenneth Henke and to all of Princeton Seminary Library’s Department of Special Col- lections. REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 311 ~~ ma. ny PROFESSOR OTTO A. PIPER IN HIS STUDY AT 58 MERCER STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANN MEUER; COURTESY OF PRINCETON SEMINARY LIBRARY’S SPECIAL COLLECTIONS.) A REPRODUCTION OF THIS PORTRAIT NOW HANGS IN CLIFTON BLACK’S OFFICE IN HODGE HALL, ON THE CAMPUS OF THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. a“ PA 312 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN theological education began in Erfurt’s Gymnasium, where he studied church history, read in Latin the Augsburg Confession, and translated New Testa- ment books in Greek. Typical of German students of his day, Piper’s advanced theological training was undertaken as a wandering scholar, hearing lectures by the finest Protestant and Catholic scholars at the Universities of Jena, Marburg, Paris, Heidelberg, Munich, and Gottingen. At Marburg, Hans Lietzmann (1875-1942) and Walter Bauer (1866-1946) trained him in historical criticism. World War I interrupted Piper’s studies at Heidelberg; he volunteered for service in the infantry, sustained a facial wound in combat, and was left for dead on the Western Front.? The war made of Piper a pacifist+ and redoubled his decision to become a theological teacher, “no longer satisfied with any interpretation of the Christian faith which could not stand the test of the terrors of battle, the heartache over the loss of relatives and dearest friends, the agony of a broken body and the self-destructive fury of warring nations.”> The war also disabused Piper of his generation’s neo-Kantian idealism. As he would later write, “The Bible unmasks both the optimistic utopias and the cynical Realpolitik of modern man as wishful thinking. . . . The belief in progress—this elusive deity of the modern age—is stigmatized as absurd by the revelation of the vanity of civilization.”° After receiving his doctorate in theology from Goéttingen in 1920, Piper served there for a decade as Privatdozent and professor of systematic theology, during the same unstable era of the Weimar Republic in which Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) and Paul Tillich (1886-1965) began their careers at Marburg.’ By one account, it was Piper who, having read a commentary on Romans by a young Swiss pastor, recommended Karl Barth (1886-1968) for his first academic post at Gottingen in 1921.° In 1930 Piper succeeded his friend Barth in the chair of theology at the University of Minster, beginning 3 The bullet taken by young Piper, exiting the back of his head without penetrating his brain, left him with one useless eye, for which he compensated in reading by use of a magnifying glass. That lens is rendered in the portrait of Piper by Eileen Mary Fabian, which now hangs in classroom two of Stuart Hall (or Hodge Hall?), on Princeton Theological Seminary campus. The irreparable damage to his facial muscles made smiling difficult for him. That is a primary reason for so many somber photographs of Piper as an adult. 4 See F. W. Graf, “Lutherischer Neurealismus: Otto Piper, ein friiher Pazifist,” Luth- erische Monatshefte 8 (1988): 357-61. Piper insisted that pacifism is no posture of weakness. God calls us to peace, a vocation demanding courage that only the Holy Spirit can provide. 5 Otto A. Piper, “What the Bible Means to Me: Discovering the Bible,” Christian Century 63 (1946): 267. ° Piper, “What the Bible Means to Me,” 334-35. 7 His dissertation was published as Das religiose Erlebnis: Eine kritische Analyse der Schleri- ermacherschen Reden iiber die Religion (G6ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1920). 8 Gerald L. Borchert, “This Man—Otto Piper of Princeton,” Seminarian 12 (May 4, 1962): 3-4. REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 313 three years of open defiance of nascent Nazism.° Following imprisonment and dismissal from his chair, Piper and his wife of Jewish descent, Elizabeth Salinger (d. 1948), were expelled from Germany in 1933 by Hitler. Years later Piper remarked, “I had some differences with Hitler and it seemed better for Germany if one of us left. As he seemed indispensable at the time. ...”’° The Pipers and their young children—Ruth (b. 1921), Gerhard (“Gero,” b. 1922), and Manfred (b. 1925)—immigrated to Great Britain, where he taught for a year at Woodbrooke College, Birmingham (1933- 1934), and afterward at the University Colleges of Swansea (1934-1936) and Bangor (1936-1937). There being no resources for his salary in Wales, Piper’s colleagues pooled and shared with him portions of their own earn- ings. Following a visiting professorship in systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary (1937), at the invitation of President John A. Mackay, in 1941 Piper was appointed there as the Helen H. P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis. With his extraordinary education, he could as easily have been appointed to a post in philosophical theology, the history of Christian thought, or systematics. On October 21, 1949, Witten- berg College (Springfield, Ohio) conferred on Piper an honorary Doctor of Laws. He held the Manson chair until his retirement from the Princeton Theological Seminary, on September 1, 1962. During and after World War II, Piper knew firsthand inexpressible suf- fering, punctuated by unswerving Christian dedication. Gerhard and Man- fred were drafted into the American armed forces. In 1944 Gero died by the hand of his German kinsmen at the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg. Meanwhile, his father conducted a relentless program in European relief, conscripting Princeton students to help him collect, inventory, package, and post clothing for German refugees. After the war, Piper was founder and president of the nondenominational American Emergency Committee for German Protestantism, a voluntary, unremunerated organization that sought to secure American sponsors for some five thousand German pastors. In recognition of these humanitarian efforts, in 1960 President Heinrich Liibke of the Federal Republic of Germany decorated him with the Officer’s Cross of Merit, First Class. Piper was naturalized an American citizen in 1942. During a sabbatical leave in Germany, he renewed a thirty-five-year-old acquaintance with an- ° See W. M. Heidemann, “‘... Immer Fiihlung mit allen Teilen der Kirche’: Der miinsterische Theologieprofessor Otto A. Piper auf dem Weg in die Emigration 1933- 1938,” fabrbuch fir westfalische Kirchengeschichte 80 (1987): 105-5t. *° Otto A. Piper, “The Professor Was Dispensable, So . . .” Province (Vancouver: July 9, 1960): 22. 314 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN other Elisabeth (Riiger), whom he married in 1950. For complicated reasons, approval of her application for an American visa was delayed for eighteen months; she could not join her husband in Princeton until 1952. In addition to his responsibilities at the Seminary, Piper was a minister of the United Presbyterian Church (USA), a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, and president of the American Theological Society (1954-1955). He held guest lectureships in Edinburgh (1935), Heidelberg (1950), Campinas (Bra- zil; 1957), and Montpelier (France; 1958). Closer to home he delivered, among others, the Stone Lectures at Princeton (1938), the Smyth Lectures at Columbia Seminary in Decatur (1949), and the Sprunts at Union Theolog- ical Seminary in Richmond (1959). Piper died in Princeton, New Jersey, February 13, 1982, not far from the retirement home he and Elisabeth had built at 26 White Pine Lane, in Princeton Township. ‘THE PUBLISHED PIPER Piper published twenty-four books and hundreds of essays and articles in German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Slovak, and English, for an audience that comprised scholars, clergy, and laity. Reflecting his broad background, his published interests were grounded in biblical studies and included contem- porary theological trends,‘' Joan of Arc,‘* Dostoyevsky,"* spirituality and mysticism, ‘+ patristics and gnosticism,*> and ecumenical and political theol- 16 ogy. Still, much of Piper’s scholarship was concentrated in two areas. The first, manifested in such books as Weltliches Christentum (Worldly Christianity),'7 Gottes Wahrheit und die Wahrheit der Kirche (God’s Truth and the Church’s "t See Otto A. Piper, Recent Developments in German Protestantism (London: SCM, 1934); Otto A. Piper, “The Interpretation of History in Continental Theology,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 50 (1939): 211-24, 306-21; Otto A. Piper, “The Church in Soviet Germany,” Christian Century 67 (1950): 1386-88. "2 Otto A. Piper, “Jeanne d’Arc: Wes Geistes Kind war sie?” Hannoverischer Kurier (3 Juli 1929, Morgen Ausgabe [Morning Edition]). "3 Otto A. Piper, “Der ‘Grofinquisitor’ von Dostojweski,” Die Furche 17 (1931): 249-73- "4 Otto A. Piper, “Meister Eckharts Wirklichkeitslehre,” Theologische Blatter 15 (Dezem- ber 1936): 294-308; “Praise of God and Thanksgiving: The Biblical Doctrine of Prayer,” Interpretation 8 (1954b): 3-20; reprinted (with Floyd V. Filson) as The Biblical Doctrine of Prayer (1956). "S Otto A. Piper, “The Apocalypse of John and the Liturgy of the Ancient Church,” Church History 2 (1951): 10-22; Otto A. Piper, “The Gospel of Thomas,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 53 (1959): 18-24. "© See Piper’s contribution to Die Kirche und das dritte Reich: Fragen und Forderungen Deutscher Theologen (Gotha: Klotz, 1932), 90-95; Otto A. Piper, Protestantism in an Ecumenical Age: Its Root, Its Right, Its Task (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965). '7 Otto A. Piper, Weltliches Christentum: Eine Untersuchung tiber Wesen und Bedeutung der aufserkirchlicen Frimmigkeit der Gegenwart (Tiibingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1924). REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 315 Truth),‘® and God in History’? is the theme of God’s action in human history. For Piper, following J. C. K. von Hoffmann (1810-1877), the biblical narrative of Heilsgeschichte (“holy history,” as he preferred to translate) and all subsequent history influenced by it constitute evidence of God’s activity in history, the theater “in which the Holy Spirit of God takes a direct part.”*° Christian hope is founded in God’s providential control of history, asserted most clearly in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ’s ministry, both earthly and glorious, “carries absolute finality ... and is the decisive event in the whole development of the [human] race.”** Because sinful humanity is forbidden the privilege of bringing about history’s God- intended end, the idea of progress and the attempt to realize even Christian ideals in the social realm apart from the divine Spirit’s power are as misguided and evil as they are naive. That, however, sanctions neither fatalism nor quietism, for Christians share the goal of their risen Lord, owe their faith to a divine impetus, and by that faith are “enabled to draw constantly on the energies of a new life that flow from the Resurrected One.”** “Church and fight against Satan are correlative terms”*}; under the Spirit’s aegis, “[Chris- tianity’s] choices are tantamount to divine verdicts,”*+ and “every realization of our hope can be regarded only as a step towards the ultimate goal, which is the full triumph of Christ.”*> Though veiled, “Everything in history serves God’s glory.”?° The Bible “is the record of God’s dealings with mankind in holy history”; “each of its words is spoken to us personally: it is the offer of salvation to us (pro nobis), and thus it is adequately apprehended only when the exegete recognizes the bearing a passage has upon his own life and predicament and that of the group in which he is living.”*”? Thus, Piper’s helisgeschichtlich emphasis was inseparable from a second preoccupation, Christian ethics, in such works as Die Grundlagen der evangelischen Ethik (The. Foundations of *8 Otto A. Piper, Gottes Wahrheit und die Wahrheit der Kirche (Tiibingen: Mohr [Sie- beck]), 1933. *9 Otto A. Piper, God in History (New York: Macmillan, 1939). ° Otto A. Piper, Heilsgeschichte 67; see also Otto A. Piper, “A Interpretacdo Crista da Historia,” Revista 9 (1954): 17-32, 265-81; 10 (1955): 23-36; 11 (1955): 23-45; 12 (1956): Gb JERS a Tig a * Otto A. Piper, “Christian Hope and History,” Evangelical Quarterly 26 (1954): 158. 77 Ibid. 750: 23 Ibid., 161. *4 Piper, “What the Bible Means to Me,” 363. *5 Piper, “Christian Hope and History,” 165. 76 Piper, God in History, 176. *7 Otto A. Piper, “Modern Problems of New Testament Rxepesis,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 36 (1942): 10, 11. 316 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Evangelical Ethics)’ and The Biblical View of Sex and Marriage.*° Conditioned and guided by the church as the Body of the risen LORD, which still seeks God’s eschatological kingdom, believers are “not anxious to bring about a new and better world.” Paradoxically, however, they find themselves “used by [their] LORD as his agent through whose activity a new world comes into being,” a reestablishment of “the cosmic order, in which everybody and everything receives the place for which it is destined.”?° Consistent with this view, Piper’s last major synthetic work, Christian Ethics (1970), prescinds from inductive analysis of moral particulars, preferring instead “an intuitive apprehension of the whole subject matter,” which “starts from the assurance that the Bible proclaims a unified message”—namely, holy history—‘“in and through the diverse views expressed therein.”>’ For Piper, ethics, “the prac- tical implications of the Christian existence,” must not be allowed to devolve into casuistic prescriptions or particular problems of social reform; “there can be no true meaning except when human life is directly related to God as its ultimate determinant.”3* Likewise, “The Biblical view of sex is decisively determined by the fact that man is a sinner and that therefore in his sex life, as in other spheres of life, he is in need of God’s forgiving love.”33 PIPER’S PRINCIPLES Piper resisted ideological labels. He complained of enduring “the vitriolic attacks by fundamentalists who denounced me as a disguised modernist and the haughty demands of liberals who could not understand that a critical scholar should believe that the Bible is the Word of God.”3+ He acknowl- edged the influence on his thought of Wilfred Monod (1867-1943), the French Protestant theologian who initiated him into “the ‘realism’ of the Bible.” By biblical realism Piper meant the apprehension, by faith, of “real things,” like God’s Spirit and demonic forces, which transcend everyday sensory experience yet govern the universe and human life.*> The God we meet in the Bible cannot be reduced to “the ground of being,” as Tillich’s *8 Otto A. Piper, in Die Grundlagen der evangelischen Ethik, 2 vols. (Giitersloh: Bertles- mann, 1928, 1930). 9 Otto A. Piper, The Biblical View of Sex and Marriage (New York: Scribner’s, 1960). 3° Otto A. Piper, “Kerygma and Discipleship: The Basis of New Testament Ethics,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 56 (1962): 18, 20. 3 Otto A. Piper, Christian Ethics (London: Nelson, 1970), x1, xii. 3? Ibid., 3, 376. 33 Otto A. Piper, The Christian Interpretation of Sex (New York: Scribner’s, 1941), X. 34 Piper, “What the Bible Means to Me,” 268. 35 Otto A. Piper, “Principles of New Testament Interpretation,” Theology Today 3 (1946): 192-204. REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 317 ontology implies. Neither is Christian faith “subjected to the tyranny of an a priori anthropology @ Ja Heidegger”3° that, by human means, discovers a general truth and tags it as “the Word,” @ /a Bultmann.?” The Bible’s reality lies in its variegated yet unified testimony to God’s compassionate judgment of humanity in the realm of history.3* “The contention of all [the biblical] writers is that there is a God who through them commands all men to do his will, and who, being concerned with the eterna/ destiny of man, offers a way of life eternal in Jesus Christ.”39 In his Manson inaugural address at Princeton (February 9, 1942), Piper articulated four hermeneutical axioms of special importance: the clarity of the Bible, the Bible’s authority, the purpose of biblical revelation, and the Bible’s intelligibility.+° (1) By clarity, Piper referred to respect for the biblical text’s literal sense and the sincerity of its writers. (2) The Bible’s authority resides in its divine efficacy as a means of grace that overwhelms, convicts, comforts, illumines, and calls forth faith in Christ, its ultimate subject matter. “It is out of his free sovereign grace that God speaks through [the Bible], and there is only one subject he wants us to understand from the bottom of our heart, namely, the fact that he has come to rescue us from the bondage of sin, death, and the devil, and to make us certain of the fact that in Jesus Christ his purpose is accomplished.”*4* Correlatively, (3) the purpose of biblical revela- tion is christocentric, which requires insight to discern the Bible’s unity amidst its varied expressions: “God reveals Himself through the Bible in order to lead people to the recognition of His grace in Jesus Christ.”4* The Bible is not merely a record of God’s past revelation; “it is also and above all a divine act by means of which God directly offers salvation in Jesus Christ to every reader.”*3 By their intimate relationship to this divine kerygma, the Gospels of the New Testament occupy a central position within the canon, on which the rest of the Bible depends for its authority.++ (4) The Bible’s intelligibility depends on mediation of the Holy Spirit, which allows the interpreter to “live in real communion with those whose faith he shares,” thus “to experience the same spiritual realities the writers had experienced.”*° 36 Otto A. Piper, “The Depth of God,” a review of Honest to God, by J. A. T. Robinson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963), in Princeton Seminary Bulletin 57 (1963): 45. 37 Otto A. Piper, “The Authority of the Bible,” Theology Today 6 (1949): 167. 38 Piper, “What the Bible Means to Me,” 267. 39 Tbid., 300 (Piper’s emphases). 4° Piper, “Modern Problems of New Testament Exegesis,” 6. 4+ Piper, “The Authority of the Bible,” 173. 42 ae “Modern Problems of New Testament Exegesis,” 9 (italicized in the original). 43 Tbid., ro. : +4 Piper, “The Authority of the Bible,” 167-73. 45 Piper, “Modern Problems of New Testament Exegesis,” 12. 318 THE PRINCETON(SEMINARY BULEE PRY Such “pneumatic exegesis” is restrained from subjectivism by historical crit- icism, which honors the dynamism and diversity of the biblical witness; by the doctrinal standards of faith in the church’s life and consciousness, by which the interpreter is conditioned and to which one is accountable; and by the exegesis of Christ’s whole Church, by which one denomination’s exegetical teaching is checked by others.*° For Piper, biblical interpretation consists of two different though coherent processes: exegesis and appropriation. The task of exegesis is to render the Bible both intelligible and comprehensible. Intelligibility depends on discov- ery of a text’s “life movement” from author to reader.4”7 Comprehension consists, first, in specifically locating each biblical idea within the author’s comprehensive view of reality and, second, in correlating the ideas of biblical documents with those of our own mind.*° Appropriation is the interpreter’s personal response to the intrinsic challenge mounted by the document, a faith-engendered appreciation of the Bible’s claim to convey a divine message of supreme and universal importance. “Modern biblical interpretation has made relatively great progress in the field of exegesis but has often utterly failed in understanding the task of appropriation,”+? owing to modernism’s disdain of biblical supernaturalism and its tendency to remove the sting of the biblical message, lest the complacency of natural systems of thought be disturbed.*° PRINCETON’S PIPER After examining only the small outcroppings of a mountain of correspon- dence, journal extracts, and newspaper clippings in Princeton Theological Seminary’s Archives, one cannot leave without appreciating the deep impres- sion of Otto Piper’s talent and personality on the Seminary and their exten- sive reach during his tenure on its faculty. In four large areas, his influence was palpable. A Teacher of Princeton’s Seminarians Compared with the expectations placed on his continental counterparts, typically insulated from workaday pedagogy for their advanced research, Professor Piper must have been jolted by his customary teaching load at aay bes a0. 47 Piper, “Principles of New Testament Interpretation,” 193-97. 48 Thid., 197-200. SAbiden2o 1 5° Piper, “Modern Problems of New Testament Exegesis,” 9. REMEMRERING OLTVO PIPER 319 Princeton. During academic year 1942-1943, immediately after his installa- tion in the Manson Chair, the Seminary’s catalogue listed his courses for that year: e Gospel History (a prescribed first-year course), e The Synoptic Gospels (a prescribed second-year course); e Apostolic History (a prescribed third-year course); e Biblical Theology of the New Testament (another prescribed third-year course); e The Parables of Jesus; e Sacraments in the New Testament; e The Gospel of John; e Exegesis of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; e The New Testament Interpretation of History; e The Making of the New Testament; e Methodology of New Testament Studies. The tote across two semesters was a staggering twenty-two hours of teach- ing.5* Piper knew that such a load was ridiculous, as he acknowledged in a letter to his students of the classes of 1938-1947. His European colleagues across the pond had far more time to get more of their own work published, to the detriment of American scholarship. Yet Piper realized the compensa- tions: “However, the constant contact which one has here [in the United States] with the life of the church-at-large through sermons, conferences and retreats, has its real advantages. It keeps the Seminary professor from be- coming purely academic and makes him aware of the fact that his primordial task is the training of future ministers.”°* Those future ministers loved him for it. Taken virtually at random, here is a commendation posted by a B.D. matriculant to President Mackay: “The course here at Seminary which has meant the most to me in terms of my personal spiritual growth and which has helped me to the greatest extent in formulating my theological views has been the course in the Exegesis of First Corinthians under Dr. Piper. In spiritual insight and understanding as well as knowledge, he is to my mind one of the most outstanding men on our faculty. 5* Anonymous, “Otto Alfred Piper 1891-1982,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 4 (1983): 52-55: 5? Letter by Otto A. Piper, February 10, 1948, p. I. I am deeply indebted to the Reverend Mr. Norman A. Robinson, pastor emeritus of Wyalusing Presbyterian Church, Pennsylvania, for making available to me his original copy of this letter. It now is housed in the Seminary’s Archives. 320 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN It seems to me, too, that he has a message for our Church and our age—he is not only a teacher, but a prophet as well!”>3 When convinced the occasion justified, Piper did not spare seminarians a jeremiad. Everyone of that era remembers him as a deeply pious person who regularly attended worship in Miller Chapel. Thus it was with humility— “Worship services should not be used as an opportunity to analyze those who officiate”—yet credibility that Professor Piper once took the Seminary’s students to task for “an excessive emphasis placed upon the confession of sins”: “Firstly, in mourning [our] faults, are we really aware of our sins? .. . Or may it be that as we bring the defects of our seminary life to the attention of those present in chapel, we actually want to make the chapel service a sounding board for our complaints about seminary life. Finding fault with fellow students we pose as the lonely advocates of a long overdue reform. . . . Do we actually worry about our hypocrisy which makes us think we do the right thing merely because we have strict moral standards? . . . Perhaps even more serious than this, however, is the fact that with our egotistic concern for our personal problems and other people’s shortcomings we fail to make God the center of our worship. We neglect the element of adoration and thanks- giving that alone makes Christians to worship God in truth. It is only when we remember what great love and compassion Christ has shown for us and how wonderfully God has put at our disposal both the resources and the opportunities for his service that we are able to realize the gravity of our sin. We are bound to overrate ourselves as long as we fail to use what God offers us. It is only when with a grateful heart we put our trust in God’s gracious gifts rather than in our own will for goodness that we learn to move in the right direction in our daily life.”°+ AN AMBASSADOR OF “THEOLOGICAL PEDAGOGICS” From his earliest years in his new homeland, Piper’s impact on the education of laity and clergy, adults and youth, was instantly recognizable and honored. Some of these unsolicited testimonials were directed to President Mackay; others landed on the desk of George Irving, then General Director of the Department of Faith and Life, for the Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church (USA). One pastoral participant in Piper’s off- campus seminars wrote this to Mr. Irving: “One feels that Dr. Piper’s thinking has been clarified and chastened by experience. He does not appear 53’To John A. Mackay, April 21, 1940. 54 Otto A. Piper, “Piper Discusses Need for Thanksgiving in Worship,” Semimarian 11 (Friday, April 14, 1961): 3. REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 321 to hold opinions so much as to be held by convictions. Therefore he is especially fitted to lead us through many of our modern superficialities back to the underlying fundamentals, in rediscovering which many of us see the hope of a revived church.”5> Yet another acclamation was mailed to Mr. Irving, prior to the Trustees’ appointment of Piper to the Seminary’s regular faculty: “Every one of us who has had the splendid opportunity to be schooled at Princeton should make it his concern to bring men of consecration, suffering and intellect to Princeton like Dr. Piper. The only regret I have is that I cannot go back and sit at Dr. Piper’s feet for three years instead of for three lectures. Let us move heaven and earth to keep him there, for under his teaching many of our future leaders in the Presbyterian Church will be enabled to move earth a little closer to heaven.”*° One of Piper’s many published articles in Theology Today—“That Strange Thing Money”—was reprinted in stewardship booklets across the country and subsequently expanded into a book.>” This was an apt product from the pen of one whose life incarnated responsibility for the neighbor. A PRIME MOVER IN A GRADUATE PROGRAM FOR THE TRAINING OF DOCTORAL STUDENTS At its inception, Piper was a guiding force in the creation of Princeton’s doctoral program, deliberately modeled on a European doctorate in theol- ogy, which was more rigorous at the time. This dimension of Piper’s con- tribution was multifarious. On the one hand, he was a programmatic archi- tect. As early as 1944—the year in which the first Princeton Seminary doctorate was conferred—Piper articulated what he regarded as sound prin- ciples for graduate study in theology.*® As he surveyed established seats of learning in Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Tiibingen, Basel and Lund— and the disarray they all had suffered during the Second World War—Piper wrote, from firsthand experience, of what would be needed to bring Prince- ton’s doctoral program into the first rank: “Thus the increase of factual knowledge, indispensable as it is, nevertheless is to be treated as a secondary goal. ... Creative imagination is the talent to discover the implications of a given truth and its application to new situations; the ability to see facts in >> To George Irving, June 16, 1938. 5° Tbid. 7 Otto A. Piper, “That Strange Thing Money,” Theology Today 16 (1959): 215-31; Otto A. Piper, The Christian Meaning of Money (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965). 58 The recipient was Donald McKay Davies, whose dissertation, “The Old Ethiopic Version of Second Kings,” was supervised by Professor Henry S. Gehman. 322 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN their entirety and thus the relation of their parts to one another and to the whole; and the intuitive perception of connections between apparently dis- parate and unrelated facts and their distinctive integration into ... an his- torical process or system.”>? Only through a professor’s close guidance of a student’s reading, in conjunction with seminars devoted to critical evaluation of original sources in the light of research by other competent scholars, could such creative imag- ination be cultivated. Piper was worried by the average student’s tendency merely to cram information: “there is little danger, as a rule, that a graduate student should suffer from overspecialization. He is far more in peril of scattering his work too thinly over the whole field, and of nowhere growing roots.”°° Piper was equally convinced, in 1944, that the Seminary library was “not at all equipped” with working facilities for graduate students.®’ It is no surprise that he played an important role in the upgrading of that which became and is now Speer Library. On the other hand, Piper was no minimalist in his perception of theolog- ical education at the graduate level. In various letters to President Mackay, he worried that the nearly complete abandonment of Latin—both patristic and modern ecclesiastical—would place students at Princeton and other Ameri- can universities at a disadvantage in competition with their international peers. In addition, and for the same reasons, he bemoaned the Seminary’s dearth of sufficient electives in ancient church history, in Greek, Latin, and Oriental patristics.°* Yet Piper’s sympathies were far from a Eurocentric parochialism. While insisting that Princeton’s doctoral program required major improvements in order to level the international field on which its graduates would have to play, he was just as quick to defend before his European colleagues “the [peculiar] genius of American theology.”©3 “Amer- ica is the only country in the world, where Protestantism was absolutely free to grow in accordance with its own principles. Therein lies the historical significance of American theology. ... Thus in the most general sense American theology is ecclesiastical theology, i.e., it gives expression to the spiritual life of the church people as a whole, whereas in Europe it is academic. [In Europe] it is the professor who tries to impose his views on the laity, even though he may call his system Kirchliche Theologie.”®* 59 Otto A. Piper, “Principles of Graduate Study in Theology,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 38 (1944): 22, 23. 6° Thid., 25. °* Thid., 26. *? Letters to John A. Mackay: November 15, 1945; February 28, 1948. 3 In two articles published in British Weekly (January 14 and 21, 1954). °4 Otto A. Piper, British Weekly (January 14, 1954). REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 323 Nor was Piper content to articulate abstract principles while others did the heavy lifting of quotidian graduate instruction. He directed twenty-two from among the eighty-nine doctoral dissertations completed at Princeton Semi- nary between 1944 and 1960°>—this from a scholar who steadily maintained his own prolific scholarship and admonished his colleagues, “Under the conditions prevailing at most seminaries it can be said that two candidates per professor constitute a heavy [supervisory] load, and three are the extreme limit.”°° His torrent of letters to “My dear Mackay” reveals an impassioned, occasionally feisty defender of his doctoral students: nominating one or another of them as teaching fellows for the Seminary’s basic instruction, sometimes complaining of their paltry remuneration. One of his Doktorkinder recalled driving twenty-six hours nonstop from his parish for the oral defense of his dissertation before the biblical department. Piper was furious, vowing never again to allow a student of his to drive twenty-six hours, then face an oral. “The questions to you were stupid. And you answered them!” THE GENTLEMAN SCHOLAR A year before his retirement from the Seminary faculty, Piper received a grant of $29,500.00 from the Lilly Endowment to oversee the compilation and publication of every published work in the field of New Testament scholarship since the invention of printing. To the best of my knowledge, that project was never completed. When spring returned to campus each year, the first eruption of floral color, tended by a floppy-hatted horticultur- alist, could be reliably enjoyed at 58 Mercer Street. Some claimed to have witnessed Dr. Piper sharing a park bench with Professor Einstein during torrid Princeton summers.® And all the biblical graduate students of that era remember the regular teas to which they were invited in the Piper home, every Friday afternoon at four o’clock, at which Elisabeth served sweets as the professor presided over conversations ranging across theology, philosophy, politics, economics, and psychology. Sometimes he would read to his guests a letter from a former student describing life in a church or academic post from some region of the globe. It was academic koinonia incarnate. It carried the ineradicable mark of Piper. °5 James F. Armstrong and James H. Smylie, eds., Catalogue of Doctoral Dissertations, Princeton Theological Seminary 1944-1960 (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1962). Then chairman of the faculty committee on publications, Piper oversaw this catalogue’s preparation. In supervising two doctoral theses, he collaborated with Professors Paul L. Lehmann and Bruce M. Metzger. ° Piper, “Principles of Graduate Study in Theology,” 25. °7 Transcribed from an interview with William O. Harris (October 14, 1997). 68 Borchert, “This Man—Otto Piper of Princeton,” 4. 324 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN WHITHER PIPER’S LEGACY? Piper’s influence on subsequent biblical scholarship is ambiguous, in large measure because his publications fell between the stools of biblical interpre- tation and constructive theology. He published no book-length commentar- ies; while of high quality, his technical exegesis was sparse.°? Like every scholar, he felt the momentary sting of a paper’s rejection for publication—in one case owing to an editor’s judgment that Piper’s submission was too heavily confessional and inadequately analytical.”° Most of his scholarship lay in the area of Christian dogmatics; yet his focus on biblical interpretation, his rejection of the prevailing philosophical categories of his day, and his leeri- ness of conventionally accepted, systematic /oci made his extensive contribu- tions in that area unpalatable to many of his contemporaries. In his perceptive “Appreciation,” which introduces Piper’s Festschrift, Seminary President James I. McCord observed, “It is not that you cannot pin him down; rather, you cannot pen him in.”7* One sympathetic reviewer of God in History conceded, “To some it will seem to be gnosis with a vengeance.”’* Piper was no gnostic. So relentless is his view of revelation, however, that aspects of his historical reconstruction seem naively gnosticizing. “Hence it was the will of God that [the Eastern Church] should be disabled by the impact of the Arabs”; “the religious enthusiasm of the Crusaders succeeded in bringing the European nations together once more.”’* Piper was aware of the danger: “Thus the authority of the Bible is not based upon the fact that Revelation is a higher type of communication of truth—that is the error underlying all gnostic systems— but rather upon the fact that [the] Bible confronts us with facts that are more comprehensive and more important than anything else we know.”’+ Substi- tute “claims” for “facts” in that sentence, however, and one wonders if Piper’s distinction of gnosis from the gospel—“God’s word to man [which] is of such a superior type of truth”—lacks formal difference.’> Piper’s treatment of Christian ethics evoked similar questions: “one man’s faith is another’s °° Otto A. Piper, “I John and the Didache of the Primitive Church,” Journal of Biblical Literature 66 (1947): 437-51; Piper, “Johannesapokalypse,” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: UTB, 1958), 3 cols., 822-34. 7° Letter to Piper, January 9, 1946. 7*J. I. McCord, “Otto Piper: An Appreciation,” in Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Otto A. Piper, ed. William Klassen and Graydon F. Snyder (London: SCM, 1962), xiii. 7* Horace T. Houf, review of God in History, by Otto A. Piper, Religion in Life 8 (1939): atic : 73 Piper, God in History, 150, 152. 74 Piper, “The Authority of the Bible,” 163. 75 Piper, “Modern Problems of New Testament Exegesis,” 1o (my emphasis). REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 325 confusion, for it comes suspiciously near a Biblicism which evades too many moral and theological issues by attributing direct causation to the hand of God, and hoping that the empirical evidence will fit.””° On balance, Piper’s slippage into corroborative events, historical or ethical, in the external world as guarantors for the experience of faith or the truth of holy history com- promises his self-avowed regard of the Christian life as “‘cruca tecta, covered by the Cross.”77 As the twenty-first century grapples with religious pluralism, specifically with the terrors wrought by religious adherents, some of Piper’s assertions about “the Jewish problem” jar. Again, Piper was no anti-Semite: “[The church] must love [Israel] as our elder sister with a deep and sincere com- passion.”’® Later, in an exegesis of Romans g-11, Piper argued that the church should challenge Judaism to make the special contribution in history assigned to it by God, without trying to convert Jews to Christian faith in a manner by which they would lose their distinctive identity.”? Still, Piper’s presentation of Judaism and other religions is tainted by a Christian trium- phalism that, at worst, rendered one of his peers “nauseous”*° and, at best, is challenged by Paul’s claim that all things—even Christ himself—will even- tually be subjected to the God who “may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). In theological study, as in every human endeavor, fashions change. For that reason, many of Piper’s comments on the Bible and its interpretation sound startlingly fresh to postmodern ears. An era seeking theological refreshment in scripture, which reads the Bible more holistically and recognizes the importance of the reader’s social situation—including a confessional location within the church—may appreciate Piper’s point of view to a degree greater than did some of his contemporaries. To assert with the Reformation, as did Piper, that the Bible is a divinely appointed means of grace that depends for its appropriation on the activity of God’s Holy Spirit, chimes at present with major currents in both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology.*’ Perhaps most attractive to legatees of Piper’s scholarship is its equipoise of fortitude and humility. Having refused to be cowed by Hitler and his fascist thugs, 7° G. R. Dunstan, “Editorial,” review article of Christian Ethics, by Otto A. Piper (1970), Theology 74 (1971): 498. 77 Piper, God in History, 178. 78 Tbid., 110. 79 Otto A. Piper, J. Jocz, and Harold Floreen, The Church Meets Judaism (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1961). ° Joseph Haroutunian, review of God in History, by Otto A. Piper (1939), Journal of Bible and Religion 7 (1939): 207. 8* See Telford Work, Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Sacra Doctrina; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Current Issues in Theology; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 326 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Piper was never intimidated by fellow academicians who regarded his reading of the Bible as wrong, even wrongheaded. Yet nothing so rankled him as biblical interpretation that resisted God’s self-revelation by only confirming the reader’s pet theories or stubborn prejudices.** For Piper, the Bible confronts its interpreter with mysteries impenetrable apart from divine self- disclosure. The proper attitude toward the Bible is that of a learner. “Gone is the presumption that one already knows everything of the nature and purpose of the Father of Jesus Christ. One will rather read it in a state of constant expectancy and, when the light of truth dawns upon one’s heart, be prepared to give up any view of God and human life previously held.”*3 As a motto, the biblical interpreter of any age can do far worse than that, and scarcely much better. Otto Piper’s training of a generation of the church’s ministers and doctors, like his practical relief efforts in a war-riven world, defy calculation. The last words must be his, for they remain as pertinent as they are prescient, decades after their original utterance: “Today, the predominant outlook of church people and non-Christians is amazingly similar, not because outsiders have been persuaded to adopt the Christian view but rather because the members of the churches, like their spiritual leaders, prefer conformity with the nonbelieving world to the protesting spirit of their ancestors.”*+ “There is real danger that our nation should imitate those whom we fought, that generals should govern our country, that we should pursue imperialistic aims, that our freedom should be threatened by an omnipotent political police, and that as a nation we should trust in the power of the sword.”*5 Finally, from what appears to have been his last lecture in Miller Chapel to his sisters and brothers in Christ at Princeton, whom he so dearly loved: “If there is a progress of goodness and justice in this world, the reason is not so much to be found in our goodness, but rather in the grace of God: that is to say, his willingness by his power to transform our good intentions into effective energies by the redemptive love of Christ. On our part, that means that we have to shift the center of Christian life and thought from ethics to soteriology, or to use the Pauline phrase, from justification by the law to justification of grace. ... To do justice to that way, a complete change of our values will be required. ... We have to learn the Christian virtues of humility *? Piper, “Modern Problems of New Testament Exegesis,” 7, 14. *3 Piper, “What the Bible Means to Me,” 301. 54 Cited in “Current and Quotable,” These Times (October, 1960): 9. 85 Piper’s letter to students of the classes of 1938-1947, p. 3. REMEMBERING OTTO PIPER 327 and patience, if in our life we are to follow the narrow path that leads to true life.”°° Characteristically, Professor Piper ended that lecture with prayer, which opened with the praise of God and so concluded: “Teach us, we beseech thee, more adequately to understand the mystery of your grace. ... Teach us, we pray, the incredible secret of the resurrection, [namely] that not only when we are in good health or in the possession of ample resources, but also when our strength fails us and when we lack earthly goods, Christ’s risen life will supplement what is lacking in our thoughts and actions; so that through the weakness of man your kingdom may become your kingdom, which with all the powers of goodness we praise you. Amen.”°7 D Manuscript of a lecture delivered in Miller Chapel, November 21, 1972, 5—6 (avail- able in Archives). 87 Thid., 7-8. Memorial Minute: Freda A. Gardner, Thomas W. Synnott Professor of Christian Education Emerita, DeWitte Campbell Director of the School of Christian Educa- tion Emerita, and a former Moderator of Wyckoff, January 4, the Presbyterian Church (USA), delivered this memorial in the Main Lounge at the Faculty Meeting on November 16, 2005. 1918, to April 5, 2005 by FREDA A. GARDNER EWITTE CAMPBELL WYCKOFF, the son of DeWitte and Cristabel Campbell Wyckoff, was born on January 4, 1918, and died on April 5, 2005. He was a descendant of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, who arrived in New Amsterdam, New Netherlands, in 1637. DeWitte Wyckoff went to Union Seminary in New York but, because it was considered too liberal, he was unable to be ordained and turned instead to law. Campbell Wyckoff grew up in northern New Jersey, in the shadow of New York City, and liked to tell that their family doctor was William Carlos Williams, the poet. In his early career, he served as an assistant in Religious Education at the Asheville Farm School, now Warren Wilson College, in Swannanoa, North Carolina; as teacher and community worker at Alpine Institute and Rural Life Center in Tennessee; Director of the Youth Division of the Greater New York Federation of Churches; and as assistant in the Unit of Rural Church and Indian Work of the Presbyterian Board of National Missions. It was during these years that he met and married Mildred Howard Mullins, who died in 2002. They had two children, Judith Wyckoff Carnahan of Portland, Oregon, and Peter Cornelius Wyckoff of Paris, France. They also had a granddaughter, Sally Carnahan of Chicago, Illinois. Campbell Wyckoff earned his early degrees and his doctorate at New York University and also studied at New College, Teachers College, in New York. In 1972 he received the Ernest O. Melby Award for “distinguished service in the field of human relations” from the Alumni Association of the School of Education at New York University. He came to Princeton Theological Seminary in 1954 and served as the Thomas W. Synnott Professor of Christian education until his retirement in 1983. While at Princeton Seminary he served for seven years as the Director of Doctoral Studies and for eleven years as the director of the seminary’s Summer School. During his tenure at Princeton, he also served at various times as visiting professor at Yale Divinity School; the United Theological College in Vancouver, British Columbia; Brite Divinity School, Texas Chris- tian University in Fort Worth, Texas; Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; DEWITTE CAMPBELL WYCKOFF 329 Scarritt College, Nashville, Tennessee; Bethel Theological Seminary; Talbot School of Theology; Drew Theological Seminary; and Syracuse University. He was also external examiner in religious education for the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. He was, for six years, the international editor of the journal Religious Education, and in 1986 he became general editor of “The Kerygma Program,” a widely used, Bible-based curriculum. He was a regular contributor of articles and reviews in journals and newsletters. A prolific writer of ten books in the field of Christian education, Campbell Wyckoff also contributed articles for Encyclopedia Americana and for the Encyclopedia of Religious Educa- tion and wrote curriculum for the church. To name a few of his books is to recognize his disciplined and focused attention to the foundations of religious education: The Task of Christian Education, The Gospel and Christian Education, Theory and Design of Christian Education Curriculum. He was sought after by many diverse groups of church educators, who welcomed him as speaker and leader of workshops in these areas. Cam, as he came to be known by his friends and colleagues at the seminary and elsewhere, was a man who took his calling seriously. His temperament matched his goals and his interests (or it may have been the other way around). He was extraordinarily meticulous, and his organizational skills were formidable. He knew early on where he was going and what he believed could be his contributions to his chosen field. In a letter to his son, Peter, in 1997, he spelled out for him what he had been trying to do in his career and where he thought his chosen field was. “During my professional years I concen- trated on the development of a theory of Christian education in terms of which the field could be organized and guided both comprehensively and authentically, and found in the process that the way to accomplish it was to focus on curriculum theory and practice. My reading, research, teaching, consultant work, and writing all contributed to that end.” Cam then demurs from an accolade that Peter must have read and mentioned to him in which Cam was referred to as a “foremost authority.” Cam says of himself in that letter to his son, “The comment was not far off the track at the time (but not now, because in my judgment the field has lost its focus and its rationale by chasing after every ideological, social, and educational fad that comes along rather than building innovatively on the foundations that have been estab- lished by earlier research and theory).” He goes on, “No one would charac- terize me as foremost authority today, because my views have faded into the background and no one at present is attempting to do what I was trying to do at that time.” 330 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN Before recording the rest of his letter to his son, it is important to note that although his approach was, perhaps, overshadowed by younger and newer educators, Cam Wyckoff did not press his agenda as something that had to be adopted by anyone smart enough to recognize it for what it was. Instead, he taught the discipline of the field by giving people the tools and content to begin to build a cogent, faithful ministry of educating the people of God. In letters I received after I had written to many of his doctoral students following his death, more than a few spoke of the gift Dr. Wyckoff had given to them in a methodology for doing the hard work of translating knowledge from many fields into a practical ministry. A case in point might be his initiative in bringing to the seminary a former student, James (Jim) Loder. To stand in the narrow hallway that separated their two offices was to see two men with the same commitment to God and God’s ways but moving in different directions to explain and express that in the church’s ministry. Jim’s office was a chaotic mélange of symbols and phrases on a chalkboard and piles of papers and unopened mail on every surface. Cam’s was an almost threat- ening model of orderliness and exactitude. Dr. Wyckoff wanted Dr. Loder here, wanted someone who was not chasing fads but was creating something new and quite different from Wyckoff work. Cam Wyckoff did some other things, as well, to replenish and refurbish his own understanding of the practical ministry of Christian education. Again, from his letter to his son, “When I took on the adult Bible class in Law- renceville,” his home church, “I found that it gave me a marvelous oppor- tunity to do Bible study on the basis of some theological and hermeneutical convictions that had been growing over the years.” I will interrupt to say that, good father and teacher that he was, he told his son to go to the dictionary for a definition of that “h” word. The major theological conviction is that God, though his being and nature are hidden from us, has chosen to make himself known by speaking in and through certain messengers such as the prophets, by becoming incarnate and living among us in the person of Jesus Christ, by providing us with the record of his acts and will in the Bible, by enabling us to sense his constant presence with us and to pray, and by the act of preaching, which is prayerful reflection on our lives and situation in the light of scripture. The third aspect of his word (communication), the Bible, enables us to know and to use the other four aspects of his word. Barth says somewhere that to know who God is and what he is doing, we are to read both the Bible and the DEWITTE CAMPBELL WYCKOFF 331 newspaper. He also says that when we read the Bible for a day, a week, a year, the time will come when we will hear him speak a word to us. The major hermeneutical conviction is that the Bible is a series of reflec- tions on what God has said and done in history, thus revealing in very concrete ways who he is and what he intends. So, the Bible must be seen in its historical and cultural contexts. Also, since it has been transmitted to us in various genres and languages, and since what we have is not a pristine document, we must work hard at clarifying and interpreting the text. In a sense we are to read the text in such a way that through it we may understand ourselves and our world more clearly, and ready ourselves to live more godly and responsible lives. This letter, written to someone loved but not well versed in theological disciplines, does, however, give a picture of the man and his methods and goals. Because it was written in the later years of his life, it tells of a person whose interest in his chosen and lifelong field of study never waned, who stayed conversant with and often appreciative of the newer understandings of younger scholars. DeWitte Campbell Wyckoff was a man of great integrity, a teacher whose goal was never to impress others or to seek to replicate himself but always to honor others and to give them the tools that could become building materials for constructing their lives and fulfilling their callings. For those who would be teachers or teachers of teachers, his research and convictions about that ministry, his life and manner, his commitments and self-discipline were transparent and offered freely to those who were trying to live a godly life and learn the sources and practices for doing so. In this he was a much valued mentor for generations of students. All this portrays Cam Wyckoff as the serious scholar and gentleman he was, but it is not all he was. He had a delightful sense of humor, sometimes droll, often dry but increasingly, as he came to know his Christian education colleagues and accept them in their own peculiarities, shared openly and warmly. He loved to tell stories, and we loved to listen to them. He became more convivial because he was a part of a mostly convivial staff, but this in no way meant that his meticulous attention to detail and to order was overlooked or shortchanged. Cam Wyckoff knew to whom he belonged. His affairs were in order when he died, and it would be known to all who knew and loved him that he knew to whom he was going when he breathed his last. Cam Wyckoff was a gift to this school and to the hundreds who studied with him, even those who never read his books but were smart enough to read his life. Thanks be to God for his presence among us. The Use and Introduction and transcription by Michael J. Paulus, Fr., Technical Services Librar- Abuse of Books ian, Special Collections, Luce Library, Princeton Theological Seminary by ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER INTRODUCTION N 1812 THE General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America elected Archibald Alexander (1772-1851) to be the first professor at its first theological seminary. Prior to his appointment as pro- fessor of didactic and polemic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, Alexander had been an itinerant preacher and college president in Virginia and then pastor of Third Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Soon after his installation, the Seminary’s board of directors appointed Alexander librarian of the Seminary, a position that, along with a professorship, he held until his death. Meeting with the Seminary’s first few students in his rented home, which was “at once library, chapel, and auditorium,” Alexander quickly began developing the curriculum and library of the nascent school to support its founding ambition: “to raise up a succession of men at once qualified for and thoroughly devoted to the work of the Gospel ministry.” The address transcribed below was delivered to one of the Seminary’s entering classes in the late 1820s.* In it, Alexander offers new students (“scholars”) guidance on how they best may use books for “information and edification.” From his opening metaphors, which speak of books as combat- ive armor and constructive tools, through his final exhortation to pray while in the midst of studies, Alexander challenges his students to consider why they read, what they read, how they read, and whether they should become authors themselves. Along the way, Alexander speculates about the origin of books, discusses the common grace found in them, and works through the implications of a growing print market for reading and writing practices. Although some of Alexander’s thoughts may strike us as antiquated, such as the linguistic priority of the Hebrew language, many others, such as the prudence with which one should pursue publishing, remain relevant and sound. ‘Joseph A. Alexander, The Life of Archibald Alexander, D.D., First Professor in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, New Jersey (New York: Charles Scribner, 1854), 373; Report of a Committee of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, Exhibiting the Plan of a Theological Seminary: To Be Submitted to the Next Assembly (New York: J. Seymour, 1810), 4. : The manuscript is located in the Archibald Alexander Collection, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries, box 8, folder 7. For dating of the lecture, see Alexander, The Life of Archibald Alexander, 468. THE USE AND ABUSE OF BOOKS 333 This previously unpublished address offers an interesting glimpse of ante- bellum theological education at Princeton and of the larger American print culture of which that education was part. More particularly, it highlights one pastor-professor-librarian’s high view of books. According to his son and biographer, Alexander “treated books with a religious tenderness.”> Behind this adoration was a belief that books were indispensable for education and growth, particularly for ministers of the Gospel. | —Michael J. Paulus, Jr. ‘THE USE AND ABUSE OF BOOKS BY ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER* As books are the scholar’s armor with which he fights, and as they furnish the implements with which he performs his work, I have selected for the subject of this introductory lecture, “The Use and Abuse of Books.” Books are the scholar’s armor. They are the implements with which he performs his work. In the early ages of the world, when the life of man was protracted through many centuries and human knowledge was confined within narrow limits, books were not necessary. The memory of the aged served as a sufficient repository of facts and oral traditions as an adequate means of their communication. But at an early period in the history of the world it appeared good to infinite wisdom to direct that the revelations which were made to man should be committed to writing. As there is no evidence of any more ancient writings than those of Moses, it is reasonable to conclude that the making of books originated in divine appointment and was performed by divine assistance. There can therefore exist no doubt as to the importance and utility of this means of instruction. The Bible, the first and best of books and heaven’s richest gift to man, contains treasures of wisdom and knowledge. But a doubt might possibly arise whether any other books were useful or necessary, especially as it is maintained that the written revelation of God’s will is perspicuous and complete. But such a doubt would readily be dissi- pated by considering that the evidence of the Bible’s authenticity depends on the knowledge of facts which must be learned from other books—that reference is often made in scriptural history to transactions as if they were known but with which we can be acquainted only by other books. The same may be said of ancient customs and opinions. The prophecies contained in the Bible foretell the destinies of many nations and cities, and of the church 3 Thid., 356. 4 Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation have been changed to conform to modern conventions. Abbreviations, contractions, and ampersands have been expanded. With the exception of the deleted portion that appears in footnote seven below, Alexander’s own corrections to his text have been incorporated into this transcription. The editor’s correc- tions appear in brackets. All footnotes in Alexander’s text are the editor’s. 334 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN even to the end of the world; in most cases the fulfillment of these predictions must be watched for in other writings than the sacred scriptures. Besides, the Bible was not given to teach us everything, but only to point out our duty and show us the method of salvation; but other knowledge is useful and even necessary to the enjoyment of those comforts which a beneficent God allows his creatures in this world, and also to the propagation of the gospel through the world. The knowledge of agriculture, of architec- ture, of the arts by which clothing is prepared, of geometry, geography, navigation, et cetera, is highly useful. But this knowledge is not contained in the Bible; for it, therefore, we must have recourse to other books. The reasoning of Omar the successor of Mohammed respecting the cele- brated library at Alexandria was not sound, who, being consulted respecting the disposal of the books, directed them to be burned, saying, If they contain anything different from the Koran they are false and pernicious—if the same, they are useless.> The state of literature, in regard to books, is greatly changed from what it formerly was. When it was necessary to make books by the slow process of writing every letter with the hand, and when the materials with which they were made were with difficulty acquired, books must have been rare and costly. None but the man of wealth could acquire any considerable number. But since the invention of printing, which must be considered the most important after the discovery of the alphabet, books have been multiplied to such a degree that a sufficient number are within the reach of every scholar. Indeed, as benefits seldom fail to be accompanied with some inconvenience, this multiplicity of books is calculated greatly to perplex and sometimes to discourage and mislead the studious scholar. He finds himself overwhelmed by a sight of this vast mass of literature which he beholds in public libraries and in bookstores. He is at a loss where to begin, or what to select, and sometimes thinks it is vain to begin at all, as he is sure he can never get through so many volumes. It is a matter of importance, therefore, that the young student should be furnished with a guide in his literary pursuits. He should also obtain the knowledge of such general rules as may be useful to direct his course when he may not enjoy the privilege of living instructors. To afford some little assistance on this subject is the design of this introductory lecture. 5 Rather than suffering a single catastrophe at the hands of Romans, Christians, or Arabs, the great libraries at Alexander suffered a series of misfortunes over the centuries until they were thoroughly destroyed or disbursed. See Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 22-32. be at I 9. IO Tat THE USE AND ABUSE OF BOOKS 335 I will begin, then, by distinctly stating some of the principal ends which can answered by books; for unless we keep these in view, we shall often wander random and spend our time and labor without profit. . Books serve in the first place as a repository of facts which occurred before we existed or beyond the sphere of our observation. It is worthy of observation that the book of God consists chiefly of facts. These are made the foundation of that system of instruction with which we are presented in the Bible. From this we may take a hint that the knowledge of facts is the most important branch of human knowledge. History, therefore, holds a high place among the objects of human knowledge. . Books are necessary to furnish us with the knowledge of languages without which ancient books, divine or human, cannot be read. We should go to the sources. . They furnish us with new, perspicuous, and enlarged views of truth by admitting us to an acquaintance with the opinions and reasonings of men of the most profound and extensive research. By [these] we are often enabled speedily to arrive at conclusions which otherwise we could not have reached at all, or only after a tedious and perplexing pursuit. In knowledge one man has the advantage of standing, as it were, upon the shoulders of his predecessors; and though not possessing greater nor equal capacity, yet he may go much further. By this means sciences have been perfected by the labors of successive generations which otherwise must have remained in their infancy. And this applies in some degree also to subjects of revelation. For the sacred scriptures give us general prin- ciples from which we are bound to derive legitimate inferences and which we must apply, according to our thrift, to the various relations and circumstances of human life. . Books also answer the purpose of resolving our doubts, which are often attended with painful perplexity. . Books also serve to confirm us in the truth of our own reasonings by exhibiting to us the progress of other minds in the same pursuits. . They assist, moreover, to detect our errors into which through ignorance or inadvertence we may have fallen. . They also save us much time and trouble by presenting truth in a methodical and apprehensible form. . Books are also useful in forming the taste by presenting to us models of good writing. They also enrich the mind by furnishing it with a variety of figures and illustrations, which might not have occurred to it without such aid. . By reading we obtain, too, a preciseness of language. . Books furnish an innocent pleasure which can be enjoyed in solitude. 336 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN They serve to amuse and relax the mind when fatigued with intense studies and arduous pursuits. 12. They improve the heart by presenting forcibly and impressively the motives which are adopted to excite pious affections and lead to good resolutions. These are the principal ends which can be answered by authors, of which we should never lose sight. In the next place I proceed to lay down some maxims which should govern us in the use of books. 1. Reading must not be substituted for thinking. Books are not properly used but abused when they are allowed to supersede the exercise of our own faculties. We must cultivate independence of mind. 2. We must not read too much. To read a great deal without exercising our own thoughts on subjects is like eating a great deal which the stomach cannot digest. The food in neither case turns to nutriment, and instead of strengthening weakens the system. Some men are constantly devour- ing books; without discrimination they swallow everything which comes in their way. An unnatural appetite is created, but no advantage is acquired. The man becomes little the wiser for all his reading. To burden the memory with a multitude of undigested and unanalyzed things is of no use. It would be better to leave them in books. 3. We should select with judgment and care the books which we read. Many books are worse than useless—they are pernicious. Others would be good if there were none better on the same subject; but it is a waste of time to read an inferior author when you might have access to one much more excellent. We should endeavor, therefore, to find out the merits of books on subjects in which we are interested. 4. An important species of knowledge to the student is, therefore, the character of books and what they contain. This may be obtained by conversations with the learned by reading judicious reviews—not only such as are recent, but the old; and by examining the contents and indexes of books; and, frequently, by reading a few chapters in a book we may ascertain its character. . All well-written books we are not bound to read—if we are already acquainted with the subject, or if we are capable of thinking for ourselves on the same, we may dispense with reading a book. Often, however, it is necessary to read so much of it as to form a judgment of its merits so that we may recommend it or affix on it our censure. 6. Many books of the most valuable kind are needed only for occasional reference. . Many books can only be read with profit by those whose minds are wa I THE USE AND ABUSE*OF BOOKS 337 prepared for the subject. It is, therefore, a disadvantage to read some books too soon, especially if they are never read again. In every science it is hurtful to dash into the more difficult before we have well learned the elementary parts. 8. Some books should be read not only with care but perused over and over again. 9. Whena book is our own property, it is useful to mark in the margins with a pencil those passages which we wish to remember or review so that we can go over the book a second time with a glance. 10. The making of long extracts from books is of little use. If our extracts become very voluminous, it is as easy to turn to what we want in the book as in our commonplace book.® It is often sufficient to know where certain things are to be found. Facts and dates should be marked with precision, and of them it is always of advantage to make a record. But elegant expressions and fine reasonings it would be better to read again in their proper place in the authors. It will, however, often be useful to make an abstract of what we read, so far as to serve as a table of contents of the volume. 11. In regard to the form of a commonplace book, it is not of much importance. Every man can invent one to suit his own taste, or he may consult such authors as have prescribed a form. 12. By encyclopedias and dictionaries and periodical works, general knowl- edge is rendered more accessible than it formerly was; but on subjects in which we wish to be truly learned we must take a different course. These works have undoubtedly extended knowledge, but they have also made scholars superficial. Compends are useful to those who have learned a science, but the more a thing is learned in detail at first, the better. 13. In selecting books, we should not blindly attach ourselves to the ancients or moderns, to writers of this or that nation or sect, to the exclusion of all others.” ° Commonplace books are notebooks in which readers record quotations from and notes about works they have read. They were most popular from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. 7 The following is crossed out in the manuscript: We should be eclectics in regard to books, collecting the good from all quarters. For models of exquisite compositions in prose and verse, we must still look to the Greek and Latin classics. The finest compositions of the moderns have been formed upon these models. In the physical sciences the ancient authors are worth nothing, except to furnish some facts. The moderns here have in all respects the advantage. In theology the moderns have advanced beyond their predecessors in some branches, especially in the knowledge of the evidences of natural and revealed religion and in biblical criticism; but in didactic and polemic theology the writers [here the section ends]. 338 14. 15. TiC, THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN In our reading, we should be careful not to scatter our labors over too wide a field. We must not attempt more than we can accomplish. To become profoundly and accurately learned in every department of sci- ence is, in the present extended state of literature, too much for any man. To excel in any branch requires that many others be comparatively neglected. By aiming at too much, we become superficial in everything. There must be a division of labor, even to understand what those have done who have gone before us. Nevertheless, general knowledge is very necessary to an accomplished minister of the gospel. He should not remain wholly ignorant of any important and useful branch of human knowledge. But whilst he cultivates the field of universal science super- ficially, he ought to be accurately acquainted with all the learning which belongs to his own profession. Much useful knowledge may be acquired in the hours of relaxation. Follow your own authors. We should be constantly on our guard lest other books lead us away from the study of the Bible or interfere in any degree with our habitual perusal of that sacred record, which contains the substance of all our theology and foundation of all our hopes. All our studies should be subordinate to that of the sacred scriptures. Better read nothing else than neglect this; other books are useful just in proportion as they aid us in understanding the Bible. No man can use too much diligence in digging in this field. It contains a treasure which never can be exhausted. Even those parts which we have studied most frequently will continue to afford us new light, if we come to them with due reverence and docility. As the world is so full of books and as the number is increasing every day, it seems needful to be given in advice to young men engaged in literary pursuits not unnecessarily to increase the number of books. It is not a sufficient reason for a man to become an author that he can write well; unless he can really cast new light on some subject, it will be better for him to retain his compositions for his own use and that of his people. With many, however, there is an itch of writing and a desire to be known to the public, which induces them to commence [as] authors when they are no how qualified for the task. In most cases it is imprudent for young men to commit themselves by publishing their sentiments, for in a series of years their minds undergo a considerable change and the old man would willingly recall what the young man has said. [E.g.] Augustine. Baxter. A man may be placed, however, in such circumstances as will justify his publishing his compositions although he may know that they possess no superior excellence. As, for example, when his people or his acquaintan- ces are furnished with few books and would be more disposed to read his, 17. 18. IQ. 20. THE USE AND ABUSE OF BOOKS 339 from personal attachment to the author, than others as good or better. Or when truth is in danger of suffering by the introduction of erroneous opinions which are disseminated by means of popular books or pam- phlets, it may become the duty of a man to repel these attempts by publishing a refutation. Or again, if a man has made himself master of some particular branch of knowledge on which there is not in print any convenient treatise, he may become very useful by imparting his acqui- sitions through the medium of the press. Or finally, if a man can write sermons or tracts adapted to the capacities of common people and is able to impress into them much of the savor of true piety, he ought to write, for such books are greatly needed. But what is more useless and what more absurd than to publish discourses which contain nothing new— nothing but what may be read in hundreds of books already in the hands of the public, and especially if all their excellence consists in their being coldly orthodox or in possessing the shadow of eloquence. In purchasing books, select rather such as you have not read than those with which you may be well acquainted, although you may know them to be valuable. And endeavor to buy such as are scarce if valuable in preference to others equally valuable, which are common. Sometimes it is easier to borrow a book than to buy it, not for sake of economy (for this would be meanness) but because you will use more diligence in reading it than if it were your own. Be not anxious to procure an extensive library at once, unless you are going to a place where books cannot easily be obtained. You will probably read with more care when you have a few well-chosen books than when you have before you a great number which will tend to discourage you. Your desire to read a volume will be greatly diminished if it lies on the shelf before your eyes for years before you find opportunity of perusing it. Get the best editions of every valuable work. In making up a library lose no opportunity of securing such books as may be often needed for reference, such as valuable dictionaries, lexicons, et cetera. As I have mentioned the borrowing of books, I would take occasion to censure the too common practice of neglecting to return borrowed books. It should be one of our fixed rules when we borrow a book to read it speedily, use it carefully, and return it certainly. Accustom yourselves to attend with care to the preservation of all useful books which you use, whether they are your own or the property of others. In order to do this, habituate yourselves to keep all the books which you have about you in good order. Let each one have its proper station, and when you have finished reading at any time, let the author be respectfully returned to his appropriate place. I have seldom known a 340 pAb 22. THE: PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN person who profited much by books who treated them rudely. A real scholar contracts a friendship for the very volume which has contributed to his information and edification. It is indeed provoking to see how some persons deface and injure valuable books, especially when they belong to others. Benevolence should lead them to hand down unim- paired to posterity every means of useful instruction enjoyed by them- selves. Converse together on the subjects of your reading. Much benefit may be derived from this practice. It is like holding up several lights around an obscure object: the part which is not illuminated by the rays of one may catch those of another. The collision of minds is often like that of flint and steel, productive of a spark of light which otherwise would have continued latent. By means of the ideas of others we are often led to views which they do not possess and are wiser. But to render such discussions useful or even safe, they must be conducted with candor and good humor. If ambition to conquer takes the place of the love of truth, instead of friendly discussion there will be disgraceful contention.® But finally, in all your reading and studies, bear it in mind that all true wisdom cometh down from above. Ask of God, therefore, to bestow upon you the knowledge of the truth. Habituate yourselves to ejaculatory prayer in the midst of your studies. When you take a book in your hand, lift up your heart to God for a blessing; and often as you read let your desires ascend to the source of light, that your minds may be irradiated with beams from the sun of righteousness.° * Point 22 appears before point 21 in the manuscript. ° The following appears at the bottom of the last page of the manuscript: To know Christ, the Messiah of God, this is eternal life. To know Christ crucified includes or supersedes all other knowledge. BOOK REVIEWS Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 1, Prolegomena. Edited by John Bolt. Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003. $49.99. Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 2, God and Creation. Edited by John Bolt. Translated by John Vriend. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004. $49.99. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was a leader of the so-called “Neo-Calvinist movement.” He worked alongside Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) to transform orthodox Reformed Christians in the Netherlands from a largely sidelined and disenfranchised subculture into a formidable force for religious, political, and social change. Like Kuyper, Bavinck was a Christian renaissance man. He acted as a de facto leader in his denomination, undertook a movement for school reform, and served for many years in the First Chamber of the Dutch Parliament. Bavinck’s primary contribution, however, was the publication of his four-volume Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (reformed dogmatics). His became the standard dogmatics of the Neo- Calvinist movement, the dogmatics every Gereformeerde pastor worth his salt had to have on his study shelf. Bavinck provided the theological foundations for a contemporary revival of Calvinism. His dogmatics remains, more than a century since its original publication, an exemplary model for connecting the seemingly incongruent categories of Calvinism and modernity. Bavinck exhibited a generosity of spirit throughout his dogmatics. Unlike Kuyper, he shied away from polemics, preferring to engage in constructive arguments with those who disagreed with him. He in fact understood modern theology from the inside, having decided against the wishes of his parents and church to study with Johannes Henricus Scholten (1811-1885) and Abraham Kuenen (1828-1891), both renowned modern theologians at the University of Leiden. His most authoritative biographer, R. H. Bremmer, contends that Bavinck owed the conceptual rigor with which he thought through the problems of dogmatics to Scholten and his scholarly method of “establishing and comparing” lines of thought within the theological tradition to the historical-critical procedure expounded by Kuenen. Although Bavinck re- mained an implacable opponent of modern theology throughout his career, the influences of modern thought forms in his dogmatics are palpable, especially in his scholarly expositions of the history of doctrine and his procedure of elucidating alternative theological standpoints with great fair- 342 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN ness before raising weaknesses internal to those positions. Broadly speaking, Bavinck sought from his student days at Leiden forward to reconcile his pietistically inclined faith with his appreciation for the modern world. “A certain tension in Bavinck’s thought between the claims of modernity, par- ticularly its this-worldly, scientific orientation, and Reformed pietist ortho- doxy’s tendency to stand aloof from modern culture continues to play a role,” writes John Bolt, “even in his mature theology expressed in the Reformed Dogmatics.” Bavinck’s theology was long transmitted to North Americans through Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, which Henry Zwaanstra has described as “pervasively dependent on Bavinck.” However, Berkhof did not transmit Bavinck’s spirit of “generous orthodoxy.” Might there have been greater openness toward modern theological and social trends if pastors from Dutch Reformed churches had been reading Bavinck rather than Berkhof? Bavinck composed his dogmatics in four volumes. The first volume covers the prolegomena to dogmatics. After dealing with preliminaries such as the place of dogmatics in the “theological encyclopedia” and the subdisciplines within dogmatics, Bavinck provided a thorough history of doctrine, dealing with the early church in East and West, Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and the Reformed. He then discussed the principia of dogmatics in three parts: the concept of principle in science and religion in general, revelation as the external principle of Christianity, and faith as its internal principle. As Bolt points out, Bavinck regarded this threefold set of principles as analogous to the trinitarian nature of God. “God is the essential foundation (principium essendi); Scripture is the external cognitive foundation (principium cognoscendi externum); and the Holy Spirit is the internal principle of knowing (principium cognoscendi internum).” In the second volume, Bavinck treated the doctrine of God and doctrines related to the “world in its original state.” The first half of the volume deals with the knowability of God, the attributes of God, and the doctrine of the Trinity. The second addresses the doctrine of election; the doctrine of creation; the origin, essence, and destiny of human beings; and the doctrine of providence. Among the highlights of the second volume is Bavinck’s penetrating analysis of the seemingly intractable disagreement between infra- lapsarians and supralapsarians. Of course, this dispute has a long history in the Netherlands. Admitting that both positions contained important truths, he concluded that neither alone “is capable of incorporating within its perspective the fullness and riches of the truth of Scripture and of satisfying our theological thinking.” This compromise position demonstrated the cath- olicity of Bavinck’s spirit and functioned, as Bremmer has remarked, to BOOK REVIEWS 343 prevent schism in the fledgling united church between the followers of Abraham Kuyper, who generally followed a supralapsarian line, and those from Bavinck’s tradition, who typically affirmed the infralapsarian position. A brief review cannot plumb the depths of even two of the volumes of Bavinck’s dogmatics. A three-day congress on Herman Bavinck held last year in Amsterdam and Kampen explored topics ranging from his doctrine of scripture to his views on Islam and world religions. (The conference pro- ceedings will be published in Dutch this year.) Bavinck was, moreover, a complex thinker who conceived Christianity as a worldview encompassing many disciplines beyond theological studies. Nevertheless, it is possible to signal at least two areas that North American theologians will likely find particularly intriguing. The first area is natural theology. Bavinck put forward a carefully delin- eated distinction between Cognitio Dei insita (implanted knowledge of God) and Cognitio Dei acquisita (acquired knowledge of God), which he used to defend a distinction between the revelation of God in the book of nature and in the book of scripture. While Bavinck looked with a critical eye on “natural theology,” which he considered a conduit to rationalism, and regarded the proofs of God as testimonies rather than demonstrations of God’s existence, he affirmed what Bremmer called the “Platonic-Augustinian” view that God has partially revealed his thoughts through the workings of the natural universe. Bavinck emphasized the significance of maintaining the relation between God’s general revelation in the natural world and his special reve- lation in Scripture for upholding the unity of God: “For Christians, these proofs (i.e., the putative proofs of God’s existence) signify that it is one and the same God who manifests himself in nature and in grace, therefore that creation and re-creation, the realm of nature and the world of ethics, do not exist side by side in Manichaen and dualistic fashion, but constitute one cosmos: the perfections of God that shine out in the world are the same as those which sparkle in the Kingdom of God.” Bavinck offers contemporary theologians the opportunity to reflect on the function of natural theology in the Christian faith in a context not yet shaped by the polemical constructions that arose from the Barth—Brunner debate, which subsequently denominated the twentieth-century discussion. The second area is the relation between theology and science. Bavinck engaged extensively with geology and evolutionary biology in his doctrine of creation. He refused to interpret the biblical accounts simply metaphorically or allegorically. But Bavinck’s belief in the unity of revelation gave him confidence that the biblical narrative and the findings of natural science would not ultimately stand in contradiction. “. . . Scripture and theology have 344 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN nothing to fear from the facts brought to light by geology and paleontology. The world, too, is a book whose pages have been inscribed by God’s almighty hand. Conflict arises only because both the text of the book of Scripture and the text of the book of nature have been so badly read and poorly under- stood.” Bavinck contended that Christian theologians should distinguish between fact and theory in science, honoring the first and remaining skep- tical—even when scientific theory seemingly favors the biblical account—of the second. “As the science of divine and eternal things, theology must be patient until the science that contradicts it has made a deeper and broader study of its field and, as it happens in most cases, corrects itself.” His decidedly critical attitude toward Darwinism can perhaps be best understood in light of the connections nineteenth-century popular philosophers forged between evolutionary theory and materialistic and monistic philosophies; the references to Vogt, Molenschott, Biichner and Haeckel, among others, show how entwined the discussion of evolutionary theory had become with the conflict between theistic and naturalistic worldviews. Although these sections of the dogmatics are the most dated, they provide a fascinating snapshot of the religion and science discussion in the late nineteenth century and they raise issues, as John Bolt points out, that continue to be discussed today in popular and scholarly circles. The English translation of Bavinck’s Gereformeerde Dogmatiek makes sev- eral improvements to the Dutch original. John Bolt has composed a general introduction to each volume as well as a brief introduction to each major doctrinal section, which summarizes the main points under discussion. He has also supplied descriptive headings for many of the subdivisions of the chapters of the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek that Bavinck himself had simply delineated by numbering. Bolt has also carefully scoured the bibliographic references, correcting them as necessary and providing English equivalents where possible. Whereas Bavinck cited his primary bibliographic references at the opening of each major section, Bolt has consolidated the bibliographies at the conclusion of each volume. He has also given each volume a name and subject index; the Dutch originals printed the indexes for all four volumes at the back of the fourth volume. One potentially confusing alteration to the English translations concerns the sequence of the chapters. Bolt has consolidated some of Bavinck’s chap- ters and broken others apart. He has also reordered the major divisions of the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, turning the introduction and three main divisions of the first Dutch volume into five parts and dividing the two main divisions of the second Dutch volume into six parts. This reorganization does not affect the text, of course, but does make it sometimes difficult to grasp the BOOK REVIEWS 345 architectonic principles of the dogmatics. The new structure also makes it somewhat difficult to follow references from previous literature about the Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, although the retention of the numbering of the Dutch subparagraphs from the second edition alleviates this problem to some extent. The late John Vriend’s translation reads fluently. Bavinck assumed that his audience could get along with Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, English, and German in addition to Dutch. The English translation smooths over these linguistic translations, generally translating the French and German into English without making a fuss about it and either relegating the ancient languages to footnotes or providing accompanying translations. English speakers may now read these volumes more easily than native Dutch speakers can read the original. Two additional volumes of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics are scheduled to be published. The third volume, which treats the fall, the person and work of Christ, and the covenant, is slated to appear in 2006. When the fourth, and final, volume—which deals with the doctrine of the church, the means of grace, and eschatology—is published the theological world will owe a debt of gratitude to John Bolt and the Dutch Reformed Translation Society for having finally made this classic dogmatics accessible to English-speaking readers. Readers who explore these volumes will likely concur heartily with Bolt’s judgment that “...Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics is biblically and confessionally faithful, pastorally sensitive, challenging, and still relevant.” Clifford Blake Anderson Princeton Theological Seminary Williams, Rowan. Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Pp. 129. $15.00. Developed from a series of lectures given at Salisbury Cathedral in 2003, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s book Why Study the Past? seeks to establish an understanding of history that holds the “strangeness” of the past in conversation with its familiarity. In a move that may frustrate the secular historian, Williams sets out to discuss the writing of the history of the Church by people of faith. Much of the text represents a grappling with a theologically sensitive historiography against theologized history; indeed, “good theology does not come from bad history.” In one sense, Williams’s book is remarkably timely. The Archbishop’s book implicitly addresses some of the profound tensions between affluent western provinces and the global south within the Anglican Communion 346 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN today. Williams would challenge those who would use history as an ideolog- ical cudgel on both sides of issues that threaten to split the Communion (most notably, issues of human sexuality). “Traditionalists sometimes miss the point because they don’t expect to be surprised by the past; progressives miss the point because they don’t expect to be interested or questioned by it.” Given this, Williams’s move from the historical to the ecclesiological in his final chapter becomes less a shift away from the question of our relationship to history and more toward a question of how we as the Church live with and in history. Williams’s work is of interest on another front, as he presents a fresh grappling with the thought of Michel de Certeau and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others. Although Williams is certainly not out to float contemporary ecclesiological and historical questions on the sea of postmodern critical thought, his work does highlight both the relevance and reasonable employ- ment of these thinkers in the work of a classically trained scholar. In this, Williams models his own argument in being open to the broadness of the tradition. Understanding history as that which happens at points of rupture in human experience, Williams contends that the historian must account for this concept, as she or he must strike a balance between concern for differ- ence and for continuity. History can never be offered as proof that things are as they have always been; nor can the past be written off. Rather, good history seeks both to address questions of identity and to acknowledge the “strange- ness of the past.” Williams challenges the common practice of yoking history to a communal mythology and instead presents us with a history that makes the reader aware of the strangeness of the past as much as it serves as a touchstone of identity. In consideration of the early church, Williams examines the way the early church defined itself and established its theological agenda in light of the events of late antiquity. He draws special attention to the early church as a community of believers that has a sense of being foreigners, rendering Christian history one of two kingdoms: one of Caesar and one of Christ. In considering the Reformation era, Williams wrestles with questions of Chris- tian unity in relation to questions of historical identity and theological allegiance. It could be argued that Williams spends too much time attempt- ing to neutralize the abuses of history and perhaps not enough time clearly delineating what can be said of history with any degree of certainty. Yet as his coreligionist, I would observe that in this Williams is thoroughly Anglican. Williams writes of history as a “moral affair” and as a spiritual discipline. In doing so, he writes in the tradition of both the Venerable Bede and Wil- liams’s own predecessor, Archbishop William Temple (William Temple, BOOK REVIEWS 347 Christianity and Social Order [New York: Seabury Press, 1977]). For Williams, history is at least as much about establishing ecclesial identity from the ruptures and stories of the past as it is about wrestling with documentary questions. Ultimately, Williams presents his readers with a well-written, well-rea- soned, and very accessible text. Doubtless, Williams’s introduction and first chapter will be of the most interest for the academic historian and the theologian, as they offer a stable model for thinking about the past. This book is of equal value to the reader in the parish church as an introduction to the question of the historical identity of the Church. R. Sloane Franklin Princeton Theological Seminary Davis, Ellen F. and Richard B. Hays, eds. The Art of Reading Scripture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Pp. 334. $32.00. The Art of Reading Scripture is a collection of essays and sermons by a distinguished group of scholars and pastors who were brought together periodically, over four years, by Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry under the collective name “The Scripture Project.” The group produced nine theses on the interpretation of scripture, which serve as prelude to the book, stating both the guidelines for the group’s approach and the results of their common effort. Fifteen essays on selected biblical passages and on herme- neutical issues follow the theses. The volume concludes with six sermons offered as samples of the fruit that is gathered by the art of reading scripture in the way exemplified in the essays. Contributors to the collection are: Gary A. Anderson, Richard Bauckham, Brian E. Daley, Ellen F. Davis, Richard B. Hays, James C. Howell, Robert W. Jenson, William Stacy Johnson, L. Gregory Jones, Christine McSpadden, R. W. L. Moberly, David C. Stein- metz, and Marianne Meye Thompson. It is impossible, in a brief review, to do justice to individual contributions in a volume that excels with fascinating, original, and persuasively argued essays. This review attempts to capture some major convictions informing the individual papers throughout the book that give a remarkable degree of unity to a publication ranging over a wide variety of topics. The authors of The Art of Reading Scripture share the view that “scriptural interpretation is properly an ecclesial activity whose goal is to participate in the reality of which the text speaks by bending the knee to worship the God revealed in Jesus Christ” (thesis 6). To the authors of The Art of Reading Scripture, the Bible is the church’s book, a living community’s sacred scripture. Of course, 348 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN the Bible can be read from a multitude of different starting points and with the most diverse questions in mind. But the writers of this book have consciously chosen to seek ways of “Teaching the Bible Confessionally in the Church,” as the title of the first essay by Ellen F. Davis programmatically declares. In accordance with this ecclesial orientation, the authors represent cross sections of different academic and nonacademic disciplines that participate in the obligation to teach the Bible as the scripture of the church. Specialists in Old and New Testament exegesis, in systematic and practical theology, in church history, and in the practice of preaching and teaching the Bible in pastoral occupations all come together to offer their efforts to the task of reading scripture together, not as an aside from their proper and distinct assignments but in the knowledge that their most basic commitment hinges on the proper understanding of scripture. In this way, The Art of Reading Scripture overcomes the sickness of compartmentalization of our theological curricula into separate and unconnected specialties and grants a glimpse into those great periods of the church when biblical and theological instruction together with historical knowledge and pastoral practice were an indissoluble whole. Is this book a harbinger of better things to come? For this reviewer, it would be a worthy endeavor. The authors of the book assume an essential unity in the message of the Bible. “Scripture is rightly understood in the light of the church’s rule of faith as a coherent dramatic narrative” (thesis 2). This thesis does not deny that the Bible contains numerous digressions and tensions, but it maintains that there exists, in the canon of scripture, an “overarching story of the work of the triune God.” David C. Steinmetz compares this one story beyond the many narratives to modern detective literature in which all subplots must be understood from the vantage point of the final solution, which corrects, and even supplants, all earlier clues. Richard Bauckham and William Stacy Johnson engage the concept of the Bible as a coherent, dramatic narrative in dialogue with postmodern philos- ophies and come to the conclusion that this dialogue can clarify the genuine biblical concept by liberating it from rationalistic shackles. The recognition of the overarching dramatic narrative of the Bible leads several authors to a reevaluation of forms of scriptural interpretation in patristic and medieval expositors that modern scholars, under the control of historicist literalism, had discarded as fanciful speculation. Brian E. Daley offers a defense of patristic exegesis of the Psalms culminating in the justification of a “herme- neutic of piety.” Gary Anderson sees in the Joseph stories of Genesis an adumbration of the passion of Christ, and Richard B. Hays gives a reading of BOOK REVIEWS 349 three resurrection texts in the Gospels that lead him to conclude that “to know the Scriptures and the power of God is to discern in Israel’s story the working of the same God who raised Jesus from the dead.” The Art of Reading Scripture is a courageous and exciting book that invites us to open the door to imaginative new ways of scriptural interpretation that, while being strikingly unfamiliar, honor at the same time the best insights and intentions of the great teachers of the church in the past. Ulrich W. Mauser Princeton Theological Seminary, Emeritus Hardy II, Clarence. James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Pp. 147. $30.00. Clarence Hardy III (Assistant Professor of Religion at Dartmouth) has written an intriguing text for anyone interested in the influence of African American theological reflection on the larger American society and culture. James Baldwin is well known and respected as a towering literary figure and social as well as cultural critic but not commonly discussed by scholars as possessing theological insight. This is an oversight that Clarence Hardy seeks to address in James Baldwin’s God. Hardy demonstrates that a close reading of Baldwin’s life, novels, plays and essays reveal that the imaginative rhetoric of Baldwin’s broader sociocultural analysis reflects a lifelong engagement with and critique of the God of his youth. With this theological treatment of one of the leading writers and social commentators of the twentieth century, Hardy elevates black theological reflection from the too often marginalized matrix of “Black Church Studies” and pejorative categorization of contextual theology. To be sure, it is not evident that Hardy considers himself a theologian in the traditional sense. But in illumining the religious imagery and themes that permeate Baldwin’s oeuvre (i.e., love, hope, judgment, and redemption), the author traces Baldwin’s thought back to the crucible of black holiness culture and conversionist expressions of Afro-Protestantism. In the process, he decodes both the negative implications and artistic import for how black people imagine and talk about the divine. The book begins with the author engaging the world of black holiness culture that Baldwin came to reject. In the opening chapter, “Religion as Bloodless Theater,” Hardy compares Baldwin’s rejection of the church with the anthropological insights of Victor Turner. Turner connects the form of the theater with religious ritual, as both create a tension between the real and imagined. For Baldwin, the church, unlike the theater, loses sight of what is real, thus becoming, in Hardy’s words, “a repository of illusions.” It is this 350 THE PRINCETON SEMINARY BULLETIN deceptive reality that nurtures false pride within believers. The end result for persons alienated from real sources of power is a sense of “self-righteous self-delusion” in the name of God. Next Hardy traces the deleterious implications of conversion-brokered religious experience on black subjectivity. In chapter two, “Conversion, the Self, and Ugliness: Black Bodies Before a White God,” we witness Hardy make connections between self-loathing and conversion by engaging a wide range of Baldwin’s characters, such as John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Laurel, 1985) and Baldwin’s personal reflections in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). In short, for black bodies already rendered ugly by the normative gaze of white supremacy, conversion to God (holiness) is commensurate to converting from blackness (sin). Baldwin’s reflections on and critique of black holiness culture was in effect a self-critique that served as the framework for his analysis of American society as a whole. Toward that end, Hardy’s chapters “But the Body Was Real: Sex, Love and the Character of Revelatory Experience” and “A Pulpit Beyond the Church: Activism, Fire, and the Coming of Judgment on (White) America” subtly describe Baldwin’s complex appropriation, refashioning, and deployment of the Christian narrative. At one point Hardy compares Baldwin to an atheist who is so consumed with the rejection of God that the rejection serves to solidify God’s existence. I think this is a subtle distinction that neither dismisses Baldwin’s religious impulses nor sophomorically labels him as a closet Christian. The author says it best in describing Baldwin as having a “hunger for the divine married to a hunger for the right.” It just so happens, as Hardy effectively identifies, for Baldwin, a seemingly “malevolent God and the permanence of black suffering” made incompatible black holiness notions of the divine and social justice. Although this text is a detailed scholarly manuscript and a thorough examination of the writings of James Baldwin, from the outset the lines between Baldwin’s perspective and the author’s own personal faith journey are blurred. The author clearly acknowledges that this is the case. I believe it is a close identification with the subject matter that makes his reading of Baldwin so compelling. However, one has to wonder if Hardy’s preoccupa- tion with his own faith journey led him toward a questionable conclusion. The author believes that Baldwin’s critique of black holiness culture and evangelical expressions of Christianity prefigured the final decline of Afro- Protestantism as a principle force in black culture. Such a narrative of decline has been prevalent in the study of black Protestantism with each generation of scholars dating back to E. Franklin Frazier and extending through the works of Howard Thurman, Charles Long, and Gayraud Wilmore. Yet none BOOK REVIEWS 351 have proven particularly convincing. Hardy contends that “All that seems to remain is a righteous indignation that continues to call America to account and a frenetic music and liturgical life that continues to demonstrate the extent to which black suffering’s cultural products can provoke, excite, be marketed and sold, and sometimes even heal.” The quote begs the question, “Is this not enough?” With the ubiquity of black evangelicalism and neo- Pentecostalism today due to advanced forms of media and marketing, the claim can be made that the God of Baldwin’s black storefront is now the God of amphitheaters, megachurches, cable networks, and even black theater and film. Is it not the case, then, that James Baldwin’s God is shaping black popular and political culture more today than during Baldwin’s life? Ques- tions such as this make the book a must read for students of American culture in general and black theological reflection in particular. Jonathan L. Walton Princeton Theological Seminary Patrick D. Miller TET NHOLBROUGHTAYOUDUTS OFA HERLANOLUERE OYE) We We a YOU SHALUHAYENGOTHERLGODS REEDREME iwc \ : t wees i inn : : Sih Si a eRe q i ] R BT HEMLOAL RY DUARDODRANBHMIEALOLS The God You Have Politics and the First Commandment THE GOD YOU HAVE Patrick D. 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